I

In the five years since the nation was last at war, the President’s office had changed very little, with one notable exception. The melodramatic, moonlit Remington, the painting called Fired On that had hung over the mantelpiece opposite Truman’s desk in 1945, had been replaced by a commanding, full-figured portrait of George Washington, while below, in front of the fireplace, stood Truman’s big office globe, his gift from General Eisenhower.

Thus from his desk now, Truman could look up at both the nation’s first Commander in Chief, resplendent in full uniform, and the world at large, a subject that weighed on him more now than ever—the world and the threat of global war, the world and the imperative need not to repeat past mistakes, the world and Harry Truman.

He was not one to worry about decisions, once made, he told a reporter, but with the “Korean affair” he could not help worrying about the inevitable consequences. “Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war,” he would tell the nation in an historic radio and television broadcast the evening of July 19, still unwilling to call what was happening in Korea a war, but an “act of aggression” by the Communist leaders.

The Washington portrait, by Rembrandt Peale, was on loan from the National Gallery. The globe, which, with its heavy three-legged stand of polished mahogany, stood nearly chest high, had been Eisenhower’s when he was Allied Commander in Europe. Truman had chosen the new arrangement himself. He was acutely conscious of everything in the room, liked it all just so. Once when Charlie Ross picked up Truman’s engagement calendar from the desk to check something, then put it back down slightly askew, Truman, while chatting on, immediately lined it up again as before.

The globe especially gave the fireplace end of the room, the northern arc of the Oval Office, a weight and importance it had not had before. Photographers now, when posing the President, liked to have him stand there, particularly for portraits with his generals. He would be asked to put his right hand on the globe, as if explaining something, a natural pose, since in discussions with the Joint Chiefs—or members of the Cabinet or Congress or his own staff—Truman would frequently go to the globe to make a point. “Harry, don’t you sometimes feel overwhelmed by your job?” he had been asked by Republican Senator Tobey of New Hampshire, and Truman had stepped to the globe and turning it slowly said, “All the world is focusing on this office. The nearest thing to my heart is to do something to keep the world at peace. We must find a way to peace, or else civilization will be destroyed and the world will turn back to the year 900.”

Now, in the first weeks of the Korean crisis, he would put his finger on various spots in Europe or the Middle East—on the Elbe or the Iranian-Soviet border—then turning the globe, point to the pale gray, of the Korean peninsula, between the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, a place most Americans still had trouble finding on a map.

“This is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman would say. “If we are tough enough now, there won’t be any next time.”

The whole of the Korean peninsula, north and south, was almost half again the size of Greece, roughly 84,000 square miles in total. The distance from top to bottom, from the Yalu River, which formed North Korea’s border with Manchuria, to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, was about 600 miles, while the distance across varied from 125 to 200 miles.

The Republic of South Korea—everything below the arbitrary dividing line of the 38th parallel—was slightly larger than the state of Indiana. Its population of 20 million was double that of North Korea, and its economy chiefly agricultural, whereas most Korean industry was in the north.

The demarcation line of the 38th parallel had no basis in Korean history, geography, or anything else. It had been settled on hastily in the last week of World War II, as a temporary measure to facilitate the surrender of Japanese troops—those north of the line had surrendered to the Soviets, those south, to American forces. The decision had been made late one night at the Pentagon by then Colonel Dean Rusk and another young Army officer named Charles Bonesteel, who picked the line of latitude 38 degrees north because it had the advantage of already being on most maps of Korea.

From Seoul, South Korea’s fallen capital city, to Pusan, its largest port at the southeastern end of the peninsula, was 275 miles by the main road and rail line—all extremely crucial miles just now, as news of the advancing North Korean “People’s Army,” the NKPA, grew steadily worse. July 1950 had become a wretched time in Korea and in Washington. News accounts portrayed Truman as “chipper” or “jaunty” no more, but as looking exhausted, seeming to “walk with the weary man’s heavy tread.” One Sunday, on a rare outing on the Williamsburg down the Potomac, he excused himself after lunch with his staff and slept the rest of the afternoon.

His press conferences were no longer held in his office but across the way in the old State Department Building, in the ornate, musty Indian Treaty Room, which offered more space for an expanding press corps. (He was also fed up with the way reporters spilled ink from their fountain pens on the rug in his office.) To repeated questions about his outlook, he maintained that “of course” he was hopeful. But as they knew from daily bulletins, and he knew better still from his morning briefings by Omar Bradley, the news from Korea was nearly all bad.

Bradley, one of the outstanding generals of World War II, was not given to exaggeration. Plain-mannered, likable, raised in Moberly, Missouri, he was Truman’s kind of man, with more inner iron than generally understood and what his deputy chief of staff at the Pentagon, General Matthew Ridgway, described as “a fine, orderly mind.” Until the Korean crisis, Bradley had reported to the President only on occasion, but he came now to the Oval Office every morning at 9:30 sharp, to unfold his map of Korea and commence his grim report in the dry, oddly high-pitched voice of a Missouri schoolteacher.

American ground forces and what was Left of the Army of the Republic of Korea, the ROKs, were being rapidly chopped to pieces. The first American ground troops—all of 256 men, two and a half companies of the 24th Infantry Division—had gone into action south of Seoul, making a brave stand near Osan, on July 5, and they had been falling back ever since, fighting desperately to keep retreat from turning to rout. Airlifted from Japan, they had been rushed into action without adequate preparation. Many were young draftees with no combat experience; nearly all were soft from garrison duty in Japan; and, like their ROK allies, they were pathetically ill-equipped in the face of a highly disciplined enemy advancing in massive numbers and with heavy Russian T-34 tanks. As the newspapers were saying, it was all tragically reminiscent of the Nazi Blitzkrieg in France in 1940. “The size of the attack, and the speed with which it was followed up,” Truman would tell the nation, “make it perfectly plain that it had been plotted all along.”

When at a meeting of the National Security Council on July 6, Vice President Barkley asked how many North Koreans were in the operation, Bradley said 90,000. American forces numbered about 10,000, the South Koreans 25,000.

In combat, American and ROK forces were often outnumbered three to one, or ten to one, in some places twenty to one. They had no tanks, no artillery, or any weapons capable of slowing the Russian tanks. (It had actually been American policy to keep the South Korean forces under-equipped before this, so as not to encourage aggressive action by South Korea against the North.) World War II bazookas bounced off the Russian tanks like stones. Matthew Ridgway would later say it was as if a few troops of Boy Scouts with hand weapons had tried to stop a German Panzer unit.

The retreat was fought in drenching rains and punishing heat, temperatures regularly over 100 degrees. July was the monsoon season in Korea. Weapons rusted, clothes rotted. With communications broken and mud roads clogged by tens of thousands of fleeing refugees, the chaos was overwhelming. American troops were wholly unfamiliar with the terrain. They knew nothing of the Korean people or the Korean language. They fought and fell back, fought and fell back, with little sleep or food, and in the terrible heat drank from drainage ditches by rice fields fertilized with human manure. As a consequence, violent dysentery ripped through their ranks. “Guys, sweat soaked, shitting in their pants, not even dropping them, moved like zombies,” remembered an American infantryman. “I just sensed we were going to find another hill and be attacked, then find another hill and so forth, endlessly forever.” Casualties were as high as 30 percent. “What a place to die,” a young soldier was quoted in the papers. Some Americans cut and ran, victims of “bugout fever.”

With his map propped on an easel before the President’s desk, Bradley went over the situation one morning in mid-July, pointing out various units, noting the length of the American-ROK line across the peninsula and the necessity of gradual withdrawal. The hope was to continue delaying actions—the most difficult kind of military maneuver—pulling back until a defensive, shortened line in the southeastern corner was reached and established.

American and ROK forces fell back from Osan to the Kum River, then to the temporary capital of Taejon, where a furious, house-to-house battle raged on July 19 (July 18 in Washington). With the city in flames, the commanding general of the 24th Division, William F. Dean, disappeared, reportedly last seen trying to stop an enemy tank with his Army .45 revolver.

Published accounts described suicidal enemy attacks, “waves” of North Koreans, a “Red tide.” “For every ten we killed another ten came charging over the hill to replace them,” an American soldier was quoted in the Washington Post. Before breakfast one morning at Blair House, Truman read on the front page of The New York Times of seven slaughtered American soldiers, prisoners of the North Koreans, who had been found by the roadside, their hands tied behind their backs and shot through the face.

“This is no orthodox war,” wrote Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald-Tribune, the only woman covering the war thus far.

“The stragglers are still coming in—small exhausted groups of them,” reported a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, a few days after the Battle of Taejon.

The retreat continued, through the steep passes of the Sobaek Mountains, to still another defensive line, on high ground behind the Naktong River. In seventeen days of savage fighting, American and ROK forces had fallen back seventy miles.

It was, in many respects, one of the darkest chapters in American military history. But MacArthur, now in overall command of the U.N. forces, was trading space for time—time to pour in men and supplies at the port of Pusan—and the wonder was the North Koreans had been kept from overrunning South Korea straightaway. Despite their suffering and humiliation, the brutal odds against them, the American and ROK units had done what they were supposed to, almost miraculously. They had held back the landslide, said Truman, who would rightly call it one of the most heroic rearguard actions on record.

On July 29, the tactical U.N. commander in the field, General Walton Walker, issued a “stand-or-die” order. There would be no more retreat, Walker said. Pusan must not fall. “There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan.” Every man must fight to the death if necessary, until help arrived.

The speech, designed no doubt for home consumption, struck the troops as uncalled for. The prospect of another Dunkirk or Bataan had I not occurred to them. “I never did like running,” a private from Philadelphia told Marguerite Higgins.

One of Truman’s important but little noted first moves in the fateful last week of June had been to recall Averell Harriman from Europe, where he had been a kind of roving ambassador, and make him a special assistant to help with war emergency problems; and one of Harriman’s first moves in his new role was to press upon the President the need for congressional support for what he was doing in Korea. He urged Truman to call for a war resolution from Congress as soon as possible, while the country was still behind him. Dean Acheson, however, disagreed, insisting that such a resolution was unnecessary and unwise. The President, said Acheson, should rest on his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief. It was true that congressional approval would do no harm, but the process of obtaining it, Acheson thought, might do great harm. In the mounting anxiety over how things were going in Korea, the timing was wrong.

Truman sided with Acheson, telling Harriman further that to appeal to Congress now would make it more difficult for future presidents to deal with emergencies.

In the first week of July MacArthur requested thirty thousand American ground troops, to bring the four divisions of his Eighth Army to full strength. Just days later, on July 9, the situation had become so “critical” that MacArthur called for a doubling of his forces. Four more divisions were urgently needed, he said in a cable that jolted Washington.

How much more could the United States commit to Korea, given the dangers in other parts of the world? General Bradley and the Joint Chiefs continued to view what was happening in Korea as a possible feint in a larger Kremlin strategy. Truman, at a meeting of the National Security Council, said he would “back out” of Korea only if a “military situation” had to be met elsewhere.

The hard reality was that the Army had only ten divisions. In Western Europe there was but one, and as Winston Churchill noted in a speech in London, the full allied force of twelve divisions in Western Europe faced a Soviet threat of eighty divisions. The NATO allies were exceedingly concerned lest the United States become too involved in distant Korea.

Years of slashing defense expenditures, as a means to balance the budget, had taken a heavy toll. And while the policy of “cutting the fat” at the Pentagon had been pushed by Republicans and Democrats alike—with wide popular approval—and lately made a noisy crusade by Louis Johnson, it was the President who was ultimately responsible. It was Truman’s policy—and along with the “fat,” it was now painfully apparent, a great deal of bone and muscle had been cut. For all its vaunted nuclear supremacy, the nation was quite unprepared for war, just as such critics of the policy as James Forrestal had been saying.

Now, in these “weeks of slaughter and heartbreak,” all that was to change dramatically and with immense, far-reaching consequences.

Truman himself had changed. Members of the White House staff spoke of the “aching pain” of the President’s disappointment, since the Communist invasion of South Korea crushed his dream of peace. He was working eighteen hours a day and the strain showed. Margaret would write of her father’s anguish as American troops were hurled back. Korea was “constantly” on his mind.

At the same time, Truman was undergoing extensive dental treatment. In three weeks beginning July 8, he had two bridges, four single crowns, and a filling replaced, in a series of twelve sessions at Walter Reed Hospital. And through all this, according to the records, he had anesthesia only once, for one of the crowns. Why he subjected himself to such an ordeal just then is puzzling, unless it was to safeguard his health overall, in anticipation of the stress of the war only growing worse.

Solemn, “war-conscious” crowds, as they were described, gathered outside Blair House every time word spread that he was meeting with his military advisers. Many Americans, perhaps most, had first thought of the Korean conflict as truly a “police action,” a mere brushfire affair that would be quickly extinguished once American forces arrived. Now letters and telegrams poured into Washington, to the White House and Congress, decrying the way things were being handled. “It would seem General Vaughan is running the Korean situation,” said one. “Are we being sabotaged by the State Department?” asked another. Those addressed to Truman were at one point running twenty to one against the war:

In the Senate, Taft called for Dean Acheson to resign. Owen Brewster wanted to let MacArthur use the atomic bomb “at his discretion.” Newspapers carried photographs contrasting the cheerful, confident President of spring with die grave, lined President of summer. “The grin in which his face was formerly permanently wreathed has disappeared,” wrote the Alsop brothers. “So, at last, has the euphoric presidential conviction that ‘everything’s going to be all right.’ ”

To the Alsops and others who had long deplored the decline of American military power, it was a case now of “we told you so.” The influence of Louis Johnson at the Pentagon had been “little less than catastrophic”—“damn near treasonous,” Joseph Alsop would later say privately. Truman had been naive at best. With the Korean crisis, however, Truman had undergone a “complete change.”

The great historic shift began at a meeting of the Cabinet on Friday, July 14. Again, as at the fateful Blair House sessions, it was Acheson who took the initiative, urging an immediate expansion of all military services and huge increases in military spending. Truman agreed. And from this point forward there was to be no turning back, not in his lifetime or in that of any of those around the table.

On Wednesday, July 19, first in a special message to Congress, then in an address to the nation, Truman said the attack on Korea demanded that the United States send more men, equipment, and supplies. Beyond that, the realities of the “world situation” required still greater American military strength. He called for an emergency appropriation of $10 billion—the final sum submitted would be $11.6 billion, or nearly as much as the entire $13 billion military budget originally planned for the fiscal year—and announced he was both stepping up the draft and calling up certain National Guard units.

“Korea is a small country thousands of miles away, but what is happening there is important to every American,” he told the nation, standing stone-faced in the heat of the television lights, a tangle of wires and cables at his feet. By their “act of raw aggression…I repeat, it was raw aggression,” the North Koreans had violated the U.N. Charter, and though American forces were making the “principal effort” to save the Republic of South Korea, they were fighting under a U.N. command and a U.N. flag, and this was a “landmark in mankind’s long search for a rule of law among nations.”

As a call to arms it was not especially inspirational. Nor did he once use the word “war” to describe what was happening in Korea. But then neither was there any question about his sincerity, nor was he the least evasive about what would be asked of the country. The “job” was long and difficult. It meant increased taxes, rationing if necessary, “stern days ahead.”

Possibly in time the strident warnings and enjoinders of NSC-68 would have effected such a turn in policy. But Korea made all that academic now. Truman’s commitment to military power was theoretical no longer. In another televised address at summer’s end, he would announce plans to double the armed forces to nearly 3 million men, saying such costs and obligations were to be part of the nation’s burden for a long time to come.

Congress appropriated the money—$48.2 billion for military spending in fiscal 1950–51, then $60 billion for fiscal 1951–52.

Was he considering use of the atomic bomb in Korea, Truman was asked at a press conference the last week of July. No, he said. Did he plan to get out of Washington any time soon? No. He would stay on the job.

That Truman was extremely vexed with his Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, and less than fond or admiring of his Far Eastern Commander, Douglas MacArthur, was well known to his staff and a cause of gathering concern at the Pentagon. “He would have saved himself a lot of grief had he relieved both men at the onset of the war,” was the subsequent view of General Bradley. Johnson had begun to show “an inordinate egotistical desire to run the whole government,” Truman later recorded. “He offended every member of the cabinet…he never missed an opportunity to say mean things about my personal staff.” His Secretary of Defense, Truman speculated, was suffering from a “pathological condition.”

When Truman learned from Averell Harriman that Johnson had been praising Senator Taft—over the phone, and in Harriman’s presence—for Taft’s attacks on Acheson (and then promised Harriman to do all he could to make Harriman Secretary of State, once Acheson was out of the way), Johnson was, in effect, finished. From Eben Ayers’ diary, it is known that the President confided Harriman’s story to Charlie Ross on July 3. The next morning, July 4, Truman drove to Leesburg, Virginia, with Margaret for what was ostensibly a holiday visit with General Marshall, who, since recovering his health, had become head of the American Red Cross. “A most interesting morning,” was all that Truman noted in his own diary.

Yet to fire Johnson then, with things going so badly in Korea, to shame the man who had been most conspicuous in carrying out Truman’s own policies at the Pentagon, would not have been a move of the kind Truman admired. So weeks passed and Louis Johnson remained.

As for MacArthur, Truman’s private view seems to have been no different from what it had been in 1945, at the peak of MacArthur’s renown, when, in his journal, Truman had described the general as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat,” a “play actor and bunco man.” The President, noted Eben Ayers, expressed “little regard or respect” for MacArthur, called him a “supreme egotist” who thought himself “something of a god.” But working with people that one did not necessarily like or admire was part of life—particularly the politician’s life—and if removing Louis Johnson would have been difficult under the circumstances, firing the five-star Far Eastern Commander would have been very nearly unthinkable. John Foster Dulles told Truman confidentially that MacArthur should be dispensed with as soon as possible. Dulles, the most prominent Republican spokesman on foreign policy and a special adviser to the State Department, had returned from a series of meetings with MacArthur in Tokyo convinced that the seventy-year-old general was well past his prime and a potential liability. In a private conference in the Oval Office, Dulles advised Truman to bring MacArthur home and retire him before he caused trouble. But that, replied Truman, his blue-gray eyes large behind his glasses, was easier said than done. He reminded Dulles of the reaction there would be in the country, so great was MacArthur’s “heroic standing.”

In later years it would be stressed by some writers that Truman had little regard for generals, even viewed them with contempt, considering them limited in outlook and ability. He himself, in retirement, would say most generals were “dumb,” “like horses with blinders on,” and would Fault their West Point education (the education he had so wanted as a youth but was denied). His bias, however, was not against generals overall, but such figures as MacArthur who seemed to feel they were above everyone else. Truman hated caste systems of any kind, disliked stuffed shirts of all varieties, and his experiences in France in 1918 had left him with an abiding dislike of the military caste system and its West Point stuffed shirts in particular.

However, his latter-day remarks notwithstanding, Truman’s regard for such generals as Bradley and Ridgway (both West Pointers) could not have been much greater. He had long considered Bradley a model officer and very quickly that summer he had come to rely on Bradley as an adviser more than anyone in his administration except Acheson. Ridgway, too, greatly impressed Truman and would in time more than justify Truman’s confidence in him. Then there were Eisenhower and Marshall—Eisenhower, the man Truman had been willing to step aside for, to make him President, and Marshall, “the great one,” whom Truman revered above all men.

Nor, importantly, did Truman at this stage express any doubt concerning MacArthur’s ability. If anything, he seems to have been banking on it.

By the first week in August, American and ROK forces, dug in behind the Naktong River, had set up the final defense line to be known as the Pusan Perimeter, a thinly held front forming an arc of 130 miles around the port of Pusan. On the map it looked like a bare toehold on the peninsula. On the ground the fighting went on as savagely as before. The monsoons had ended. Now the troops cursed the heat and dust so thick that supply trucks kept their headlights on at midday. But the retreat was over. Besides, the headlong advance of the North Koreans had cost them heavily—their casualties had been worse even than the Americans imagined. Their supply lines were now greatly overextended. U.N. forces controlled the sea and air, while at Pusan, the buildup of American tanks, artillery, and fresh troops was moving rapidly. At his briefing for the President on Saturday, August 12, in his customary, dry, cautious way, Bradley, for the first time, described the situation as “fluid but improving.”

Averell Harriman, meanwhile, had returned from a hurried mission to Tokyo, bringing the details of a daring new MacArthur plan.

Harriman had been dispatched to tell the general of Truman’s determination to see that he had everything he needed, but also to impress upon him Truman’s urgent desire to avoid any move that might provoke a third world war. This was Truman’s uppermost concern and there must be no misunderstanding. In particular, MacArthur was to “stay clear” of Chiang Kai-shek—a sore point since MacArthur had made a highly publicized flying visit to Formosa on July 31 to confer with Chiang, after which he had been photographed kissing Madame Chiang’s hand. Chiang, Truman had instructed Harriman to tell MacArthur, must not become the catalyst for a war with the Chinese Communists.

Harriman, as Truman appreciated, had known MacArthur on a first-name basis since MacArthur was Superintendent at West Point in 1920.

Accompanied by Ridgway and General Lauris Norstad of the Air Force, Harriman had left for Tokyo on August 4, and on the morning of their return to Washington, August 9, Harriman went directly from the airport to Blair House, taking no time to shave or shower or have breakfast. As he would later explain, Harriman had scheduled his return so he could see the President at about 7:00 A.M., the best time to “catch him alone.”

MacArthur had no reservations about the decision to fight in Korea, “absolutely none,” Harriman reported. MacArthur was certain neither the Chinese Communists nor the Russians would intervene in Korea. Concerning Chiang Kai-shek, MacArthur had assured Harriman that of course, as a soldier, he would do as the President ordered, though something about MacArthur’s tone as he said this had left Harriman wondering.

Of greater urgency and importance was what Harriman had to report of a plan to win the war with one bold stroke. For weeks there had been talk at the Pentagon of a MacArthur strategy to outflank the enemy, to hit from behind, by amphibious landing. The details were vague and the Joint Chiefs remained highly skeptical. But in Tokyo, Harriman, Ridgway, and Norstad had been given a grand unveiling, a brilliant, two-and-a-half-hour exposition delivered by MacArthur “with all his dramatic eloquence,” as Ridgway wrote. The three men were completely won over, “enthralled,” said Harriman, and ready to go home and argue for the plan. It could mean “our salvation,” Harriman told Truman.

The idea was to make a surprise amphibious landing on the western shore of Korea at the port of Inchon, 200 miles northwest of Pusan. The problem was that Inchon had tremendous tides—tides of 30 feet or more—and no beaches on which to land, only sea walls. Thus an assault would have to strike directly into the city itself, and only a full tide would carry the landing craft clear to the sea wall. In two hours after high tide, the landing craft would be stuck in the mud.

To Bradley it was the riskiest military proposal he had ever heard. But as MacArthur stressed, the Japanese had landed successfully at Inchon in 1904 and the very “impracticabilities” would help ensure the all-important element of surprise. As Wolfe had astonished and defeated Montcalm at Quebec in 1759, by scaling the impossible cliffs by the Plains of Abraham, so, MacArthur said, he would astonish and defeat the North Koreans by landing at the impossible port of Inchon. But there was little time. The attack had to come before the onset of the Korean winter exacted more casualties than the battlefield. The tides at Inchon would be right on September 15.

“I made clear to the President the difficulties of the plan,” Harriman later said, “including the very heavy tide which would make landing any reinforcements impossible until the next high tide.”

Truman told him to see Johnson and Bradley “as fast as you can.” Though Truman had made no commitment one way or the other, Harriman left the house convinced that Truman approved the plan.

At the Pusan Perimeter desperate fighting raged on, American casualties mounting—6,886 by August 25, by mid-September double that number. Soldiers who had fought in Europe were calling Korea a tougher war than any they had known. In a long, searing dispatch in Time and Life, correspondent John Osborne described it as “an ugly war,” “sorrowful,” “sickening,” “an especially terrible war.” No one who saw it firsthand would ever speak of it as a “police action.” The savagery of the North Koreans was appalling, but that of some South Korean police was hardly less. Americans described seeing enemy troops within plain sight changing from the green uniforms of the North Korean Army to the common white trousers and blouses of the Korean peasants. The awful uncertainty of who was friend and who was foe had already forced American troops to their own appalling acts and attitudes.

The buildup of men and arms pouring into Pusan was phenomenal. Still, warned Osborne, “We may be pushed out of Korea.”

By early August, General Bradley could tell the President that American strength at Pusan was up to 50,000, which with another 45,000 ROKs and small contingents of U.N. allies, made a total U.N. ground force of nearly 100,000. Still the prospect of diverting additional American forces for MacArthur’s Inchon scheme pleased the Joint Chiefs not at all. Bradley continued to view it as “the wildest kind” of plan.

But on August 10, after a series of intense White House meetings, the Joint Chiefs and National Security Council approved the strategy in principle. As further sessions followed in Tokyo and in Washington, Bradley, Admiral Sherman, and General Collins expressed “the gravest misgivings,” as Bradley reported to Truman at a briefing Saturday, August 26, the same day the Associated Press broke a statement from MacArthur to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he strongly defended Chiang Kai-shek and the importance of Chiang’s control of Formosa: “Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia.” It was exactly the sort of dabbling in policy that MacArthur had assured Harriman he would, as a good soldier, refrain from.

Truman was livid, “his lips white and compressed.” Dispensing with the usual greetings at his morning meeting with Acheson, Harriman, Johnson, and the Joint Chiefs, he read the whole of MacArthur’s statement aloud. Acheson, outraged, called it rank insubordination. To Bradley the message was “the height of arrogance.” Harriman was the most upset of all. Truman would later say he considered but rejected the idea of relieving MacArthur of field command then and there and replacing him with Bradley. “It would have been difficult to avoid the appearance of demotion, and I had no desire to hurt General MacArthur personally.”

Truman asked Louis Johnson to have MacArthur withdraw the statement. When Johnson demurred, Truman dictated the message himself and told Johnson to act on it at once.

But whatever his anger at MacArthur, to whatever degree the incident had increased his dislike—or distrust—of the general, Truman proceeded with discussion of the Inchon plan, and in spite of objections voiced by Bradley and the others, he decided to give MacArthur his backing. “The JCS inclined toward postponing Inchon until such time that we were certain Pusan could hold,” remembered Bradley. “But Truman was now committed.” On August 28, the Joint Chiefs sent MacArthur their tentative approval.

It was, they all knew, an enormous gamble. Several of MacArthur’s own staff, as would later be known, thought the plan unwise. MacArthur himself called it a 5,000-to-l shot. Bradley wrote that “a failure could be a national or even international catastrophe, not only militarily, but psychologically.” Truman had been strongly influenced by Harriman and by a memorandum of support from Ridgway. But in the last analysis, he relied on his own instincts. “It was a daring strategic conception,” he would write later. “I had the greatest confidence it would succeed.”

In time to come, little would be said or written about Truman’s part in the matter—that as Commander in Chief he, and he alone, was the one with the final say on Inchon. He could have said no, and certainly the weight of opinion among his military advisers would have been on his side. But he did not. He took the chance, made the decision for which he was neither to ask nor receive anything like the credit he deserved.

“Hell and high water every day,” was Truman’s description of the next several weeks. He had decided to show Louis Johnson the door.

On Wednesday, September 6, General Marshall came alone to the White House, and Truman, as he had twice before when he needed him, asked Marshall to return to service, this time as Secretary of Defense. Marshall warned Truman to consider carefully. “I’ll do it,” he said. “But I want you to think about the fact that my appointment may reflect upon you and your administration. They are still charging me with the downfall of Chiang’s government in China. I want to help, not hurt you.”

Greatly moved, Truman wrote to Bess, “Can you think of anyone else saying that?”

Three days later, Saturday, September 9, after one last Oval Office session on Inchon, the Joint Chiefs sent MacArthur a final go-ahead. The landing was to take place on September 15, in less than a week.

On Monday, the 11th, Truman summoned Louis Johnson and told him he must quit. Further, in announcing his resignation, Johnson was to recommend General Marshall as his successor.

Johnson looked as if he might faint. Truman felt dreadful. Johnson pleaded for time to think it over. He could have a day, Truman said, but there would be no change. Returning the next afternoon with an unsigned letter of resignation in hand, Johnson begged Truman not to fire him. When Truman insisted he sign the letter, Johnson broke down and wept. He had seldom ever been so miserably uncomfortable, Truman later said. He had known Johnson for thirty years.

The resignation of Johnson and the nomination of Marshall were announced at once.

In the early hours of September 15—it was afternoon in Washington, September 14—the amphibious landing at Inchon began. As promised by MacArthur, the attack took the enemy by total surprise, and as also promised by MacArthur, the operation was an overwhelming success that completely turned the tables on the enemy.

The invasion force numbered 262 ships and 70,000 men of the Tenth Corps, with the 1st Marine Division leading the assault. Inchon fell in little more than a day. In eleven days Seoul was retaken. Meantime, as planned, General Walker’s Eighth Army broke out of the Pusan Perimeter and started north. Seldom in military history had there been such a dramatic turn in fortune. By September 27 more than half the North Korean Army had been trapped in a huge pincer movement. By October 1, U.N. forces were at the 38th parallel and South Korea was in U.N. control. In two weeks, it had become an entirely different war.

In Washington the news was almost unbelievable, more by far than anyone had dared hope for. The country was exultant. It was a “military miracle.” A jubilant President cabled MacArthur: “I salute you all, and say to all of you from all of us at home, ‘Well and nobly done.’ ”

For nearly three months, since the war began, the question had been whether U.N. forces could possibly hang on and survive in Korea. Now suddenly the question was whether to carry the war across the 38th parallel and destroy the Communist army and the Communist regime of the north and thereby unify the country. MacArthur favored “hot pursuit” of the enemy. So did the Joint Chiefs, the press, politicians in both parties, and the great majority of the American people. And understandably. It was a heady time, the excitement of victory was in the air. Except for a few at the State Department—Chip Bohlen, Paul Nitze, George Kennan, who had returned to service temporarily—virtually no one was urging a halt at the 38th parallel. “Troops could not be expected…to march up to a surveyor’s line and stop,” said Dean Acheson. “As a boundary it had no political value.”

Truman appears to have been as caught up in the spirit of the moment as anyone. To pursue and destroy the enemy’s army was basic military doctrine. If he hesitated or agonized over the decision—one of the most fateful of his presidency—there is no record of it.

The decision was made on Wednesday, September 27. MacArthur’s military objective now was “the destruction of the North Korean Armed Forces”—a very different objective from before. He was authorized to cross the 38th parallel, providing there was no sign of major intervention in North Korea by Soviet or Chinese forces. Also, he was not to carry the fight beyond the Chinese or Soviet borders of North Korea. Overall, he was free to do what had to be done to wind up the war as swiftly as possible. George Marshall, now Secretary of Defense, told him to “feel unhampered tactically and strategically,” and when MacArthur cabled, “I regard all of Korea open for military operations,” no one objected.

Carrying the war north involved two enormous risks—intervention by the Chinese and winter. But MacArthur was ready to move, and after Inchon, MacArthur was regarded with “almost superstitious awe.”

By diplomatic channels came warnings from the foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China, Chou En-lai, that if U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel, China would send troops in support of North Korea. In Washington—at the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House—such warnings were judged to be largely bluff.

At the end of the first week of October, at Lake Success, New York, the United Nations recommended all “appropriate steps be taken to ensure conditions of stability throughout Korea,” which meant U.N. approval for proceeding with the war. Just days later, on October 9, MacArthur sent the Eighth Army across the 38th parallel near Kaesong, and the day following, Truman made a surprise announcement. He was flying to an unspecified point in the Pacific to confer with General MacArthur on “the final phase” in Korea.

II

It was the kind of grand, high-level theater irresistible to the press and the American public. Truman and MacArthur were to rendezvous, as was said, like the sovereign rulers of separate realms journeying to a neutral field attended by their various retainers. The two men had never met. MacArthur had been out of the country since 1937. Truman had never been closer to the Far East than San Francisco.

The meeting place was a pinpoint in the Pacific, Wake Island, a minute coral way station beyond the international date line.

The presidential expedition was made up of three planes, the Independence with Truman, his staff, physician, and Secret Service detail; an Air Force Constellation carrying Harriman, Rusk, Philip Jessup, Army Secretary Pace, and General Bradley, plus all their aides, secretaries, and Admiral Arthur Radford, commander of the Pacific Fleet, who came on board at Honolulu; and a Pan American Stratocruiser with thirty-five correspondents and photographers. General MacArthur flew with several of his staff, a physician, and Ambassador John Muccio.

As a courtesy, Truman let MacArthur choose the place for the meeting, and for Truman, Wake Island meant a flight across seven time zones, a full round trip from Washington of 14,425 miles, while MacArthur had only to travel 4,000 miles from Tokyo and back. Events were moving rapidly in Korea, Truman would explain, “and I did not feel that he [MacArthur] should be away from his post too long.”

To many the whole affair looked like a political grandstand play to capitalize on the sudden, unexpected success of the war and share in MacArthur’s Inchon glory on the eve of the off-year elections in November. The President had been out of the headlines for some time, it was noted. Now he was back, and for those Democrats in Congress who were up for reelection, it was “the perfect answer to prayer and fasting.” MacArthur himself, en route to Wake Island, appeared disgusted that he had been “summoned for political reasons.” In fact, the idea for the meeting had originated with the White House staff as “good election year stuff,” Charlie Murphy remembered, and at first Truman had rejected it for that very reason, for being “too political, too much showmanship.” Apparently it was only after being reminded that Franklin Roosevelt had made just such a trip to meet with MacArthur at Hawaii in 1944 that Truman changed his mind.

Dean Acheson, who was conspicuously absent from the presidential entourage, had strongly disapproved and asked to be excused. “While general MacArthur had many of the attributes of a foreign sovereign…and was quite as difficult as any, it did not seem wise to recognize him as one,” Acheson would write. “The whole idea was distasteful to me. I wanted no part in it and saw no good coming from it.”

Truman, too, appears to have had second thoughts, even as he flew the pacific. “I’ve a while of a job before me,” he wrote to Nellie Noland from the plane east of Hawaii. “Have to talk to God’s right-hand man tomorrow….”

That a dramatic meeting between the President and his Far East Commander could, at this juncture, have great political value was, of course, undeniable. But to many who took part in the meeting, the charge that it was only, or even primarily, a political ploy would be emphatically dismissed as absurd. “Sheer nonsense,” said Bradley.

The importance of the occasion, like its drama, centered on the human equation, the vital factor of personality. For the first time the two upon whom so much depended, and who were so strikingly different in nature, would be able to appraise one another not at vast distance, or through official communiqué or the views of advisers only, but by looking each other over. As Admiral Radford commented at the time, “Two men can sometimes learn more of each other’s minds in two hours, face to face, than in years of correct correspondence.” Truman, after returning, would remark simply, “I don’t care what they say. I wanted to see General MacArthur, so I went to see him.”

Also what would be largely forgotten, or misrepresented by both sides in time to come, after things turned sour, was how the meetings at Wake Island actually went, what the President and the general actually concluded then, once having met.

Truman’s plane put down at 6:30 A.M., Sunday, October 15, just as the sun rose from the sea with spectacular brilliance, backlighting ranks of towering clouds. The single airstrip stretched the length of the island.

MacArthur was there waiting. In a later account of Truman’s arrival at Wake, as given to the author Merle Miller by Truman and Wallace Graham, MacArthur would be pictured deliberately trying to upstage Truman by circling the airstrip, waiting for Truman to land first, thus putting the President in the position of having to wait for the general. But it did not happen that way. MacArthur was not only on the ground, he had arrived the night before and was at the field half an hour early. Averell Harriman, whose plane had come in a few minutes before the Independence and who stood waiting with MacArthur, would remember MacArthur asking what the meeting was about. Harriman had said it was to discuss how a political victory could be attained in Korea, now that MacArthur had won such a brilliant military victory. “Good,” said MacArthur. “The President wants my views.”

With an eye on Truman’s plane as it began its approach, MacArthur took Harriman by the arm and started walking toward the runway. Harriman spoke of the strong support the President had given the Inchon operation. MacArthur said that at Inchon, he, MacArthur, had taken “grave responsibility” upon himself. Perhaps, said Harriman, MacArthur should consider the responsibility the President had assumed in backing him, and to this, noted Harriman, MacArthur registered keen interest.

As Truman stepped from the plane and came down the ramp, MacArthur stood waiting at the bottom, with “every appearance of warmth and friendliness.” And while onlookers noted also that the general failed to salute the President, and though Truman seems to have been somewhat put out by MacArthur’s attire—his open-neck shirt and “greasy ham and eggs cap” (MacArthur’s famed, gold-braided World War II garrison cap)—the greeting between them was extremely cordial.

MacArthur held out his hand. “Mr. President,” he said, seizing Truman’s right arm while pumping his hand, which experienced MacArthur watchers knew to be the number one treatment.

“I’ve been waiting a long time meeting you, General,” Truman said with a broad smile.

“I hope it won’t be so long next time, Mr. President,” MacArthur answered warmly.

Truman was dressed in a dark blue, double-breasted suit and gray Stetson. In Honolulu, he had outfitted his whole staff in Hawaiian shirts, but he looked now conspicuously formal, entirely presidential, and well rested, having slept during most of the last leg of the flight.

For the benefit of the photographers, he and MacArthur shook hands several times again, as a small crowd applauded. Then the two men climbed into the back seat of a well-worn black two-door Chevrolet, the best car available on the island, and drove a short distance to a Quonset hut by the ocean, where, alone, they talked for half an hour.

According to Secret Service Agent Henry Nicholson, who rode in the front seat beside Floyd Boring, the driver, Truman began talking almost immediately about his concern over possible Chinese intervention in Korea. Nicholson would distinctly recall Truman saying, “I have been worried about that.”

At the Quonset hut, according to Truman’s own account in his Memoirs, MacArthur assured him victory was won in Korea and that the Chinese Communists would not attack. When MacArthur apologized for what he had said in his Veterans of Foreign Wars statement, Truman told him to think no more of it, he considered the matter closed—a gesture that so impressed MacArthur that he later made a point of telling Harriman.

What more was said in the Quonset hut is not known, since no notes were taken and no one else was present. But clearly the time served to put both men at ease. Each, to judge by his later comments, concluded that the other was not as he had supposed.

Like so many others meeting MacArthur for the first time, Truman was struck by the engaging manner, the remarkable physical bearing, the celebrated “presence.” The general, Truman would write, “seemed genuinely pleased at this opportunity to talk with me, and I found him a most stimulating and interesting person. Our conversation was very friendly—I might say much more so than I had expected.”

MacArthur, for his part, later told Harriman that newspaper accounts and magazine articles did not do the President justice. In his own Reminiscences, MacArthur would write: “I had been warned about Mr. Truman’s quick and violent temper and prejudices, but he radiated nothing but courtesy and good humor during our meeting. He has an engaging personality, a quick and witty tongue, and I liked him from the start.”

About 7:30 they reemerged in the brilliant morning sunshine and again drove off in the Chevrolet, now to a flat-roofed, one-story, pink cinder-block shack, a Civil Aeronautics administration building with a wind sock floating above, close to the beach where the Japanese had stormed ashore in 1941. Beyond the beach, blue Pacific rollers crashed over the dark hulks of two Japanese landing boats.

Others, some seventeen advisers and aides, were waiting in a large, plain room opening onto several smaller anterooms, these separated only by half-length, louvered swinging doors. Truman, setting a tone of informality, said it was no weather for coats, they should all get comfortable. He sat in his shirtsleeves at the head of a long pine table, MacArthur on his right, Harriman on the left, the rest finding places down the table or against the walls. MacArthur, taking out a briar pipe, asked if the President minded if he smoked. Everyone laughed. No, Truman said, he supposed he had had more smoke blown his way than any man alive.

The conference lasted less than two hours, during which Harriman, Bradley, Dean Rusk, and Philip Jessup each kept notes, and quite openly. A State Department stenographer, Vernice Anderson, who was sitting in an adjoining room just beyond one of the half doors, and could thus hear clearly most of what was said, also took notes in shorthand. She had been asked to wait outside until she was needed to type up a final communiqué at the close of the meeting, but she kept her shorthand record of the meeting “automatically,” as she later explained, because it seemed the thing to do. No one had told her to and no one had told her not to. Because she remained out of sight, she would be portrayed later by MacArthur’s admirers as a “planted” eavesdropper “lurking behind the door,” her presence decried as “playing politics at about its lowest level.” MacArthur was said to have been deeply offended when a transcript of the meeting, based on a composite of all the notes taken, including those by Anderson, was made public. Yet when MacArthur received copies of the transcript less than a week after the conference, he expressed no surprise or displeasure, and suggested no changes.

The meeting proceeded without formal agenda, and as MacArthur later wrote, no new policies or war strategies were proposed or discussed. But the discussion was broad-ranged, with MacArthur doing most of the talking, as Truman, referring only to a few handwritten notes, asked questions. As so often before, MacArthur’s performance was masterful. He seemed in full command of every detail and absolutely confident. “He was the most persuasive fellow I ever heard,” remembered Charlie Murphy; “indeed a military genius,” said Frank Pace. The time moved swiftly.

MacArthur had only good news to report. The situation in Korea was under control. The war, “the formal resistance,” would end by Thanksgiving. The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, would fall in a week. By Christmas he would have the Eighth Army back in Japan. By the first of the year, the United Nations would be holding elections, he expected, and American troops could be withdrawn entirely very soon afterwards. “Nothing is gained by military Occupation. All occupations are failures,” MacArthur declared, to which Truman nodded in agreement.

Truman’s first concern was keeping it a “limited” war. What were the chances of Chinese or Soviet intervention, he asked. “Very little,” MacArthur said.

The Russians, MacArthur continued, were a different matter. The Russians had an air force in Siberia and could put a thousand planes in action. A combination of Chinese ground troops and Russian airpower could pose a problem, he implied. But coordination of air support with operations on the ground was extremely difficult and he doubted they could manage it.

The support he had been given from Washington was surpassing, MacArthur stressed. “No commander in the history of war,” he said, looking around the table, “has ever had more complete and adequate support from all agencies in Washington than I have.”

How soon could he release a division for duty in Europe, Bradley wished to know. By January, MacArthur assured him.

Dean Rusk, concerned that the discussion was moving too fast, passed Truman a note suggesting he slow down the pace. Too brief a meeting, Rusk felt, would only fuel the cynicism of a press already dubious about the meeting. Truman scribbled a reply: “Hell, no! I want to get out of here before we get into trouble.”

Much of the time was taken up with questions concerning the rehabilitation of Korea, now that victory was at hand. There were questions about costs, concern over what to do about war criminals, a question from Bradley on what was to be done with some sixty thousand North Korean prisoners. (“They are the happiest Koreans in all Korea,” MacArthur said. “For the first time they are well fed and clean.”) Then, briefly, the discussion moved to the French effort against the Communists under Ho Chi Minh in Indochina, a situation Truman and MacArthur both found puzzling. MacArthur could not understand why the French couldn’t “clean it up” in a few months. He couldn’t understand it either, Truman said. Later, talking with Dean Rusk, MacArthur said that all the French needed was an aggressive general.

When Truman said there was no need for discussion of Formosa, since he and MacArthur had already talked “fully” about it and were in “complete agreement,” MacArthur said nothing—which suggests either that he and Truman covered more concerning Formosa than MacArthur’s VFW remarks, or, more likely, that MacArthur had no inclination to disagree now, no desire to say anything that might detract from the rosy picture he was painting or disrupt the harmony of the moment.

As to the need for additional United Nations troops, MacArthur would leave that for Washington to decide, and it was then, at about 9:05, that Truman called a halt.

“No one who was not here would believe we have covered so much ground as we have been actually able to cover,” he said. He suggested a break for lunch while a communiqué was prepared. But MacArthur declined, saying he was anxious to get back to Tokyo and would like to leave as soon as possible, which to some in the room seemed to border on rudeness. “Whether intended or not,” wrote Bradley, “it was insulting to decline lunch with the President, and I think Truman was miffed, although he gave no sign.”

“The communiqué should be submitted as soon as it is ready and General MacArthur can return immediately,” Truman said. The conference had lasted one hour, thirty-six minutes.

In later studies, some historians would write that Truman had traveled extremely far for not much. But to Truman, at the time, it had all been worth the effort. He was exuberant. He had never had a more satisfactory conference, he told the reporters present. Tony Leviero of The New York Times described him beaming “like an insurance salesman who had at last signed up an important prospect.”

As the communiqué was being drawn up, Truman and MacArthur, off to themselves, even talked politics. MacArthur asked the President whether he planned to run for reelection—the Emperor of Japan wished to know, MacArthur quickly added. Truman responded by asking MacArthur what his own political ambitions were.

“None whatever,” MacArthur said. “If you have a general running against you, his name will be Eisenhower, not MacArthur.”

Truman laughed. He liked and admired Eisenhower, considered him a friend, but, said Truman, “Eisenhower doesn’t know the first thing about politics.”

The communiqué, which MacArthur read and initialed, stressed “the very complete unanimity of view” that had made possible such rapid progress at the conference table and called MacArthur “one of America’s great soldier-statesmen.” At the airstrip, in a little ceremony just before boarding his plane, Truman said still more as he honored MacArthur with a Distinguished Service Medal. He praised MacArthur for “his vision, his judgment, his indomitable will and unshakeable faith,” his “gallantry and tenacity” and “audacity in attack matched by few operations in history.”

Later, on the way home, in a speech at San Francisco carried worldwide by the Voice of America in twenty-six languages, Truman would refer repeatedly to MacArthur, the man who had written a “glorious new page” in military history. “It is fortunate for the world that we had the right man for this purpose—a man who is a very great soldier—General Douglas MacArthur.”

There was no substitute for personal conversation with the commander in the field who knows the problems there from firsthand experience, Truman said in the speech. But he had felt also a “pressing need” to make clear that there was “complete unity in the aims and conduct of our foreign policy.”

MacArthur, too, left Wake Island in high spirits. On the flight to Tokyo, according to Ambassador Muccio, MacArthur was at his “sparkling best,” “effervescent.” After listening to Truman’s San Francisco speech, he immediately cabled the President his warm approval.

The whole spirit of Wake Island was one of relief and exhilaration. The awful bloodshed in Korea, the suffering, was all but over, the war was won. If MacArthur said there was “very little” chance of the Chinese coming in, who, after Inchon, was to doubt his judgment, and particularly if what he said confirmed what was thought in Washington? (“On this one MacArthur and the rest of us were all wrong,” Dean Rusk would write in retrospect.) If Truman and MacArthur had disliked or distrusted one another before the meeting, they apparently did so no longer. If the conference had accomplished that alone, it had been a success.

As things looked late the morning of Sunday, October 15, 1950, on Wake Island, MacArthur would be winding up the war almost any day. “Come up to Pyongyang. It won’t be long now,” were his parting words to the Washington reporters who saw him off at the airstrip. The problems ahead in Korea, presumably, were to be problems only of peace and rehabilitation, problems of just the kind MacArthur, with his experience in postwar Japan, was equipped to handle.

For Truman, the Commander in Chief, his decision of June 30, to commit American arms and prestige to check aggression in Korea, the moves made to make it a United Nations effort, had never looked so sound. His “police action,” for all the dark hours of summer, had succeeded. The Communist advance was thrown back. He had matched words with deeds. He had done what he felt he must for the good of America and the world, made the right choices after all, chosen the right general, backed him, gambled on his audacity. And it had all worked. Korea, it seemed, could be included now with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, NATO, as among the proudest accomplishments of his presidency. With the Korean crisis settled, the war nearly over, the dreadful possibility of a larger world conflict was also passing, which, to Truman, exceeded all other considerations. If he was beaming like a successful insurance salesman, if MacArthur was “effervescent,” they had good reason.

Truman believed and often said that how a person stood in history had a lot to do with the timing of his death. Had he or MacArthur died then or shortly after—had one of their planes gone down, or either succumbed to heart failure—their place in history and their record of achievement would have looked quite different from what would follow.

They said goodbye in the glaring sunshine of midday at Wake Island as Truman boarded the Independence.

“Goodbye, sir,” MacArthur said. “Happy landing. It has been a real honor talking to you.”

It was their first and their last meeting. They never saw each other again.

III

By all signs Truman gave little thought to his own physical safety while President. When your time was up, it was up, was his feeling and it did not matter much what precautions were taken. He liked the Secret Service agents who watched over him, most of whom came from small towns or backgrounds much like his own and none of whom ever asked anything of him. “I like them more than all the top-notchers,” he once told Margaret. Particularly he enjoyed chatting with the two or three who regularly accompanied him on his morning walks. He knew where they came from, whether they were married or had children, which church they attended. “He would treat us almost like sons,” remembered one, Rex Scouten. “He talked nearly the whole time as we walked—about the Army [Truman liked the fact that Scouten, too, had been in the artillery], about his growing up in Missouri, and the Civil War. He’d go by a building and he’d tell you all about the building and why it was designed the way it was….”

His interest in them, they knew, was more than passing. When Truman learned, for example, that Floyd Boring’s wife had had a baby, he had another Secret Service man drive him to the hospital to visit with her and see the child.

But the unbroken presence of protectors, the feeling of being constantly under guard, grated on him. He never became accustomed to it. He would have much preferred less security than more. If after moving to Blair House he had any misgivings about the security problems it posed, he never said a word.

At midday on Wednesday, November 1, 1950, two weeks after the Wake Island conference, Truman returned to Blair House at the end of an extremely disquieting morning. According to a report from his new head of the CIA, General Walter Bedell Smith, it had been “clearly established” that the forces now opposing U.N. troops in North Korea included Chinese Communist soldiers, their numbers estimated as high as fifteen to twenty thousand.

The day in Washington was unseasonably hot—the hottest November day on record, 85 degrees in the shade along Pennsylvania Avenue.

Truman joined Bess and Madge Wallace for a quiet lunch, then went upstairs for a nap. At 2:50 he was scheduled to leave for Arlington Cemetery, to speak at the unveiling of a statue of British Field Marshal Sir John Dill, a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff during World War II, who had died in Washington in 1944 as a result of his wartime service.

Because of the heat, Truman took off his clothes and stretched out on the four-poster bed in his underwear, the window open.

The rest of the house grew quiet. Bess and her mother had retired to another room. Downstairs, the front door stood open to the street, the screen door latched. On duty in the comparative cool of the front hall was Secret Service Agent Stuart Stout.

“The house was so quiet, the day so close, it was a struggle to stay awake,” remembered the assistant head usher, J. B. West, who with head usher Howell Crim was in their small office just off the hall.

Outside, three White House police were posted, all sweltering in winter uniforms. Except for the heat, the afternoon was passing like any other. People strolled by beneath the President’s window. Streetcars and automobiles moved along in the bright sun of the avenue. Autumn leaves floated down from the trees.

To ease the monotony somewhat, the guards worked on a rotation system, “the push,” and at 2:15 the push began, placing Private Donald Birdzell at the bottom of the front steps, just under the canopy, where he stood facing the street. In two white-painted guard booths on the sidewalk to his left and right, about 30 yards apart, were two more uniformed White House guards. In the booth to the left, east toward Lafayette Square, Private Joseph Davidson sat talking with Agent Floyd Boring. (“I’d come out more or less to chat,” Boring recalled. “[Davidson] had a pair of glasses on, and I’d never seen him with glasses on before…. I said, ‘Why the glasses? To see these girls going by here?’ ”)

In the guard booth up the sidewalk, to the right, was Private Leslie Coffelt.

A fourth White House policeman, Joseph Downs, who had just been relieved by Coffelt, was starting for the basement door when two slim, neatly dressed men approached Blair House from opposite directions, coming along the sidewalk with the other pedestrians. The time was 2:19.

The two looked so subdued and unobtrusive in their dark suits and hats that a clerk in the hotel near Union Station where they stayed the night before had mistaken them for divinity students. The man approaching from the west, toward Leslie Coffelt’s booth, was Griselio Torresola. He was twenty-five years old. The other, coming from the east, was Oscar Collazo, who was thirty-six. They were both from New York, both Puerto Ricans, and fanatic Puerto Rican nationalists. To bring attention to their cause they had decided to kill the President.

Torresola was armed with a German Luger. Collazo, who had never fired a pistol before, carried a German Walther P-38. Between them they had sixty-nine rounds of ammunition.

Torresola paused at the window of Coffelt’s booth and began saying something in a loud voice, apparently in an effort to divert attention from his partner, Collazo, who by then had walked directly past the other booth—past Davidson and Boring—and was heading straight for the Blair House stoop, where Donald Birdzell had his head turned, looking west toward Coffelt.

Birdzell would remember hearing a faint but unmistakable metallic click. Whirling about, he saw Collazo just eight or ten feet away, pointing the P-38 at him and trying to fire.

The gun went off, as Birdzell grabbed for his own pistol. Birdzell was hit in the right leg, but amazingly, instead of shooting back, and despite his leg, he had the presence of mind to run out into Pennsylvania Avenue, to draw the fire away from the President’s quarters. As he moved, Collazo pivoted and kept firing, hitting him again. Birdzell crumpled by the streetcar tracks, but turned on one knee and shot back.

By now gunfire was exploding on all sides. Torresola had stepped to the open door of the west sentry booth and opened up on Coffelt point-blank. With bullets ripping his chest and stomach, Coffelt went down and began slowly to bleed to death. Torresola spun and fired at Joseph Downs, the White House policeman at the basement door, hitting him three times. Downs somehow struggled through the door yelling for help.

“It all happened so rapidly…I didn’t really know what the hell was going on,” Floyd Boring remembered. There were screams, shouting. People everywhere were running for cover. The noise of gunfire was terrifying—twenty-seven shots in two minutes.

Boring and Davidson opened fire on Collazo. A bullet clipped his ear, another his hat. With his second shot Boring hit him in the chest and Collazo went face down on the sidewalk, legs splayed out beside the front step, his hat still on.

Torresola, meantime, had wheeled and fired at Birdzell out by the streetcar tracks. Struck now in his good leg, Birdzell pitched forward, yet kept firing, his pistol braced on the pavement at arm’s length. Then the dying Leslie Coffelt somehow got hold of his own pistol and brought Torresola down with a single shot through the head.

With that, suddenly, it was over and for a few seconds, strangely silent. Then people came running from every direction—more police, photographers, Secret Service agents and reporters from the White House, a crowd of hundreds.

In the front hall, Agent Stout, who had rushed to the gun cabinet in the usher’s office, stood ready now at the front door with a Thompson submachine gun.

J. B. West, stepping into the hall, saw the First Lady on the stairway. What was happening, she asked. There had been a shooting, West said. He remembered her gazing at him, “eyes wide,” then hurrying back up the stairs.

Truman, in the roar of gunfire, had jumped from his bed and rushed to the window. Seeing him, someone on the sidewalk had shouted, “Get back! Get back!” until he moved away.

Ambulances nosed through the crowd outside. A rumor spread that the President had been murdered. Traffic backed up for blocks in every direction.

Birdzell lay motionless in the street, blood flowing onto the pavement from both legs. Coffelt was sprawled on his back beside his sentrybox. Downs, who had been dragged to a basement room, was asking for a priest.

Torresola was dead, doubled in a heap beneath a boxwood hedge. Collazo was still alive.

Truman quickly dressed and came downstairs. Looking out from the first floor, he could see a cluster of police bending over Collazo at the front stoop and Charlie Ross making his way through the police and up the steps. Would the President still be going to Arlington? “Why, of course,” Truman said.

In another fifteen minutes, he was on his way out the back door, and with seven or eight Secret Service men following immediately behind in a big open car, some of them hanging onto the sides, his limousine wheeled out of the driveway and sped across the Potomac.

At Arlington, the several hundred people gathered for the ceremonies saw Truman step from the car looking grim but calm. No one knew what had happened, until ten minutes later when a motorcycle messenger arrived to pick up a photographer’s film and immediately the word spread, a murmur running through the crowd. Standing beside the equestrian bronze of Sir John Dill, Truman kept to his prepared remarks as if nothing had happened. “It is important to the peace of the world to understand each other and have full faith in each other’s sincerity. That is all we ask. That is all we want….”

Only afterward, on hearing that Private Leslie Coffelt had died at the hospital, did Truman become extremely upset. As he would say later, when a plaque in Coffelt’s memory was placed on a new iron fence in front of Blair House, Coffelt had been one of the best-liked officers on the White House force.

Officers Birdzell and Downs eventually recovered from their wounds and returned to their jobs.

Ironically, Truman had done more for Puerto Rico than any previous President. He favored the right of the Puerto Rican people to determine their political relationship with the United States and had said so several times. He had named the first native Puerto Rican as governor of the island, and extended Social Security to the people of Puerto Rico.

“But Truman was…just a symbol of the system,” Oscar Collazo would insist in explanation. “You don’t attack the man, you attack the system.”

Convicted on four counts, including the murder of Coffelt, Collazo was sentenced to death in the electric chair. However, in 1952, and as a gesture to the people of Puerto Rico, Truman would commute the sentence to life imprisonment. In 1979, after twenty-nine years in Leavenworth Penitentiary, Collazo would be pardoned by President Jimmy Carter.

“A President has to expect these things,” Truman told reporters as he set off on his morning walk the day after the shooting. The outing looked casual, as though nothing had changed. Truman, stepping out at his usual brisk pace through the quiet city, appeared no different than on other mornings. But he was being watched over now by at least a dozen more Secret Service men in addition to the four immediately beside him—some walking well ahead or across the street, others, more heavily armed, following in a slow-moving automobile.

Keeping his regular scheduled press conference that afternoon, Truman insisted in response to questions that he had never been in danger. The only thing one need worry about, he told Admiral Leahy, was bad luck and that was something he never had. But he kept thinking about what had happened. It had all been so “unnecessary,” he said in a note to Acheson, “and the people who really got hurt were wonderful men.” The gunmen had been fools, “stupid as they could be.” “I know I could organize a better program than they put on,” he wrote, a sign that he knew perfectly well how differently things might have gone. His plan to attend the ceremony at Arlington had been in the morning paper. The assassins had only to have waited another twenty minutes, until he came out of the house.

On November 5, in St. Louis, on his way to Independence to vote, he sat in a hotel room writing in his diary:

He was “really a prisoner now,” he told Ethel Noland. The “grand guards” protecting him at Blair House had never had a fair chance. “The one who was killed was just cold bloodedly murdered before he could do anything.”

In Washington henceforth there would be no more walking across the street from Blair House to the West Wing. Truman would be driven back and forth in a bulletproof car with a roof that, as he said, would “turn a grenade,” a floor to “stop a land mine.”

He had always imagined he might take care of any would-be assassin, as had Andrew Jackson, who, when shot at by a deranged assailant at the Capitol, went after the man with his cane.

IV

From November 1, the day of the assassination attempt, through December 1950 was a dreadful passage for Truman. Omar Bradley was to call these sixty days among the most trying of his own professional career, more so even than the Battle of the Bulge. For Truman it was the darkest, most difficult period of his presidency.

The off-year elections, though nothing like the humiliation of 1946, were a sharp setback for the Democrats and in some ways extremely discouraging. Local issues were decisive in many congressional contests, but so also were concerns over the war in Korea and what Time referred to as the suspicion that the State Department had “played footsie with Communists.” “The Korean death trap,” charged Joe McCarthy, “we can lay at the doors of the Kremlin and those who sabotaged rearming, including Acheson and the President, if you please.” Senator Wherry said the blood of American boys was on Acheson’s shoulders. In Illinois, Republican Everett Dirksen, running against Senator Scott Lucas, the Democratic majority leader, said, “All the piety of the administration will not put any life into the bodies of the young men coming back in wooden boxes.”

McCarthy, who was not up for reelection, had vowed to get Lucas and Millard Tydings both, and both senators, two of the administration’s strongest supporters, went down in defeat. Tydings especially was the victim of distortions and lies. In the campaign in Maryland, McCarthy and his aides circulated faked photographs showing Tydings chatting with Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party. In the California Senate race, Richard Nixon defeated Helen Gahagan Douglas by calling her, among other things, “pink down to her underwear.”

One of the saddest things of all, Truman told a friend, was the way McCarthyism seemed to have an effect. In thirty years of marriage, Bess Truman had seldom seen him so downhearted, blaming himself for not keeping the pressure on McCarthy.

Fifty-two percent of the votes cast in the country had gone to the Republicans, 42 percent to the Democrats. The Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress, but the Democratic majority in the Senate had been cut from twelve to two, in the House from seventeen to twelve. And though Truman had taken no time for campaign speeches, except for one in his own state, in St. Louis on the way home to vote, the outcome was seen as a personal defeat. In the Senate, for all practical purposes, he no longer had control. Furthermore, Arthur Vandenberg, upon whom Truman had counted so long for nonpartisan support, was seriously ill and not likely to return.

“Some Republicans interpret the election as meaning that you should ask for the resignation of Mr. Acheson,” a reporter said at his next press conference.

Mr. Acheson would remain, “Period,” said Truman.

Was he blue over the elections? Not at all, he said. And in truth, the elections were a minor worry compared to what was happening in Korea.

That Chinese troops were in the war was by now an established fact, though how many there were remained in doubt. MacArthur estimated thirty thousand, and whatever the number, his inclination was to discount their importance. But in Washington concern mounted. To check the flow of Chinese troops coming across the Yalu, MacArthur requested authority to bomb the Korean ends of all bridges on the river, a decision Truman approved, after warning MacArthur against enlarging the war and specifically forbidding air strikes north of the Yalu, on Chinese territory.

Another cause of concern was MacArthur’s decision, in the drive north, to divide his forces, sending the Tenth Corps up the east side of the peninsula, the Eighth Army up the west—an immensely risky maneuver that the Joint Chiefs questioned. But MacArthur was adamant, and it had been just such audacity after all that had worked the miracle at Inchon. “Then there were those,” wrote Matthew Ridgway, “who felt that it was useless to try to check a man who might react to criticism by pursuing his own way with increased stubbornness and fervor.”

With one powerful, “end-the-war” offensive, one “massive comprehensive envelopment,” MacArthur insisted, the war would be quickly won. As always, he had absolute faith in his own infallibility, and while no such faith was to be found at the Pentagon or the White House, no one, including Truman, took steps to stop him.

Bitter cold winds from Siberia swept over North Korea, as MacArthur flew to Eighth Army headquarters on the Chongchon River to see the attack begin. “If this operation is successful,” he said within earshot of correspondents, “I hope we can get the boys home for Christmas.”

The attack began Friday, November 24, the day after Thanksgiving. Four days later, on Tuesday, November 28, in Washington, at 6:15 in the morning, General Bradley telephoned the President at Blair House to say he had “a terrible message” from MacArthur.

“We’ve got a terrific situation on our hands,” Truman told his staff a few hours later at the White House, having waited patiently through the morning meeting, dealing with routine matters, as those around the room brought up whatever was on their minds.

The Chinese had launched a furious counterattack, with a force of 260,000 men, Truman said. MacArthur was going over on the defensive. “The Chinese have come in with both feet.”

They were all the same, familiar faces around him—Charlie Ross, Matt Connelly, Harry Vaughan, Charlie Murphy, Bill Hassett, George Elsey, William Hopkins—with one addition, the author John Hersey, who was writing a “profile” of the President for The New Yorker and had been given permission to follow him through several working days, routine working days presumably. (It was unprecedented access for a writer, but Hersey had appealed to Truman on the grounds that what he wrote might be a contribution to history.)

Truman paused. The room was still. The shock of what he had said made everyone sit stiff and silent. Everything that had seemed to be going so well in Korea, all the heady prospects since Inchon, the soaring hopes of Wake Island were gone in an instant. As Hersey wrote, everyone present knew at once what the news meant for Truman, who would be answerable, “alone and inescapably,” for whatever happened now in Korea. The decision to go beyond the 38th parallel had been his, just as the decision to risk the Inchon invasion had been his. Only this time the results had been different.

William Hopkins, the executive clerk, handed the President a stack of letters for his signature, most of them responses to correspondence about the assassination attempt. (In the weeks following the attempt, Truman received some seven thousand letters expressing gratitude that he was unharmed. He insisted that each of these be answered and he personally signed all seven thousand letters of acknowledgment.) As he wrote his name again and again, working down the pile, he talked of the “vilifiers” who wanted to tear the country apart. The news from Korea meant the enemy had misjudged American resolve. There had been an article in Pravda about deep divisions in Washington, he said. “We can blame the liars for the fix we are in this morning…. What has appeared in our press, along with the defeat of leaders in the Senate, has made the world believe that the American people are not behind our foreign policy….”

He began outlining the immediate steps to be taken to inform the Cabinet and the Congress. Thus far he had shown no emotion. But now he paused again, and suddenly, as Hersey recorded, all his “driven-down” feelings seemed to pour into his face.

There were questions. Was the figure really 260,000 Chinese? Yes, Truman replied. Probably nothing should be announced yet, said Ross. Truman agreed. For the staff, watching him, the moment was extremely painful. Unquestionably, as he had said, it was the worst news he had received since becoming President.

But then he seemed to recover himself, sitting up squarely in his high-backed chair. “We have got to meet this thing,” he said, his voice low and confident. “Let’s go ahead now and do our jobs as best we can.”

“We face an entirely new war,” MacArthur declared. It had been all of three days since the launching of his “end-the-war” offensive, yet all hope of victory was gone. The Chinese were bent on the “complete destruction” of his army. “This command…is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength.”

In following messages MacArthur called for reinforcements of the “greatest magnitude,” including Chinese Nationalist troops from Formosa. His own troops were “mentally fatigued and physically battered.” The directives under which he was operating were “completely outmoded by events.” He wanted a naval blockade of China. He called for bombing the Chinese mainland. He must have the authority to broaden the conflict, MacArthur insisted, or the administration would be faced with a disaster.

That same day, November 28, at three o’clock in the afternoon, a crucial meeting Of the National Security Council took place in the Cabinet Room—one of the most important meetings of the Truman years. For it was there and then in effect, with Truman presiding, that the decision was made not to let the crisis in Korea, however horrible, flare into a world war. It was a decision as fateful as the one to go into Korea in the first place, and stands among the triumphs of the Truman administration, considering how things might have gone otherwise.

General Bradley opened the discussion with a review of the bleak situation on the battlefield. Alben Barkley, who rarely spoke at such meetings, asked bitterly why MacArthur had promised to have “the boys home for Christmas”—how he could ever have said such a thing in good faith. Army Secretary Pace said that MacArthur was now denying he had made the statement. Truman warned that in any event they must do nothing to cause the commander in the field to lose face before the enemy.

When Marshall spoke, he sounded extremely grave. American involvement in Korea should continue as part of a United Nations effort, Marshall said. The United States must not get “sewed up” in Korea, but find a way to “get out with honor.” There must be no war with China. That was clear. “To do this would be to fall into a carefully laid Russian trap. We should use all available political, economic and psychological action to limit the war.”

Limit the war. Don’t fall into a trap. The same points would be made over and over in time to come. “There was no doubt in my mind,” Truman would write, “that we should not allow the action in Korea to extend to a general war. All-out military action against China had to be avoided, if for no other reason than because it was a gigantic booby trap.”

“We can’t defeat the Chinese in Korea,” said Acheson. “They can put in more than we can.” Concerned that MacArthur might overextend his operations, Acheson urged “very, very careful thought” concerning air strikes against Manchuria. If this became essential to save American troops, then it would have to be done, but if American attacks succeeded in Manchuria, the Russians would probably come to the aid of their Chinese ally.

The thing to do, the “imperative step,” said Acheson, was to “find a line that we can hold, and hold it.”

Behind everything they faced was the Soviet Union, “a somber consideration.” The threat of a larger war, wrote Bradley, was closer than ever, and it was this, the dread prospect of a global conflict with Russia erupting at any hour, that was on all their minds.

The news was so terrible and came with such suddenness that it seemed almost impossible to believe. The last thing anyone had expected at this point was defeat in Korea. The evening papers of November 28 described “hordes of Chinese Reds” surging through a widening gap in the American Eighth Army’s right flank, “as the failure of the Allied offensive turned into a dire threat for the entire United Nations line.” The whole Eighth Army was falling back. “200,000 OF FOE ADVANCE UP TO 23 MILES IN KOREA” read the banner headline across The New York Times the following day. The two calamities most dreaded by military planners—the fierce Korean winter and massive intervention by the Chinese—had fallen on the allied forces at once.

What had begun was a tragic, epic retreat—some of the worst fighting of the war—in howling winds and snow and temperatures as much as 25 degrees below zero. The Chinese not only came in “hordes” but took advantage of MacArthur’s divided forces, striking both on their flanks. The Eighth Army under General Walton Walker was reeling back from the Chongchon River, heading for Pyongyang. The choice was retreat or annihilation. In the northeast the ordeal of the Tenth Corps was still worse. The retreat of the 1st Marine Division—from the Chosin Reservoir forty miles to the port of Hungnam and evacuation—would be compared to Xenophon’s retreat of the immortal ten thousand or Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow.

“A lot of hard work was put in,” Truman would remember of his own days in Washington.

For most of his time in office, Truman had enjoyed extremely good relations with the working press of Washington. He genuinely liked and respected most reporters—made himself available to them for questioning at regular weekly press conferences, or on his morning walks to any who felt up to it. “Remember, photographers are working people who sell pictures,” he once advised Margaret. “Help them sell them. Reporters are people who sell stories—help them sell stories.” And in turn reporters liked and respected him more perhaps than he realized. When he stepped before them in the Indian Treaty Room, at his press conference the day after the assassination attempt, the long applause they gave him was from the heart.

“No President of the last 50 years was so widely and warmly liked by reporters as Mr. Truman,” Cabell Phillips would write.

Press Secretary Charlie Ross, too, deserved part of the credit for such feelings, for never had he thought it necessary to “sell” Truman to them.

It was the great press lords of the day, the powerful publishers and editors, and several of the syndicated columnists—the “paid columnists,” the “guttersnipe columnists”—whom Truman despised: “What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts, editor of the Kansas City Star, had written in patronizing fashion on Truman’s first day in office. Henry Luce considered Truman the “reductio ad absurdum of the common man.” Michael Straight, editor of The New Republic, had written in 1948 that Truman had “a known difficulty in understanding the printed word.” Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell, and Drew Pearson had all hit him hard, and in ways he would not forget.

Privately he spoke of the lot with vivid contempt. Roy Roberts was “a fat no-good can of lard,” Pegler “a rat,” Winchell and Pearson “newsliars.” The Alsop brothers were “the Sop Sisters.” He detested the newspapers of the Hearst and Scripps-Howard chains, and the lowest of all, still, was Colonel Robert (“Bertie”) McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune. As Truman saw things, McCormick and his kind made their fortunes as character assassins, while those who did the dirty work for them, like some of the columnists, were no better than whores in that they offered their favors for money. “The prostitutes of the mind in my opinion…are much more dangerous to the future of mankind than the prostitutes of the body,” he wrote in a letter he never mailed to Frank Kent, a columnist for the Washington Star whom he particularly disliked. That November, hearing from a friend that a Chicago Tribune writer named Holmes was in Kansas City asking questions about Truman and his family, Truman wrote in reply, “You might tell the gentleman named Holmes that if he comes out with a pack of lies about Mrs. Truman or any of my family his hide won’t hold shucks when I get through with him.”

But for those who covered him daily at the White House, who had traveled with him in 1948, who had been to Key West, he had no such feelings—Cabell Phillips and Tony Leviero of The New York Times, Edward Folliard of the Washington Post, Merriman Smith of United Press, Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, Robert Nixon of the International News Service, Joe Short of the Baltimore Sun. And it was they, his friends, not the “newsliars” or the Bertie McCormicks, who again stood to ask their questions at a sensational press conference the morning of November 30, 1950, when Truman stumbled into still more trouble, blundering as he had never before with reporters, his remarks sending shock waves around the world.

The Indian Treaty Room was packed—more than two hundred stood as he came in—and at first all went well. He began by reading a prepared text, a strong, compelling statement of policy.

Neither the United States nor the United Nations had any aggressive intentions against China. What was happening in Korea, however, was part of a worldwide pattern of Russo-Communist aggression and consequently the world was threatened now with a serious crisis.

As he had once decided to take a stand at Berlin, Truman was now resolved to stay in Korea, and he said so. He was not bombastic, he was not eloquent, only clear and to the point.

The statement had been worked over with extreme care by a dozen or more of the White House staff and State Department. It said nothing about the atomic bomb. The subject of the bomb had never even been discussed during preparation of the statement.

But then the questions began, reporters rising one by one, Folliard of the Post first asking Truman if he had any comments on the criticism of MacArthur in the European press.

“They are always for a man when he is winning, but when he is in a little trouble,” Truman replied, “they all jump on him with what ought to be done, which they didn’t tell him before.” General MacArthur was doing “a good job.”

Taking an exaggeratedly deep breath, Folliard then said the particular criticism was that MacArthur had exceeded his authority, went beyond the point he was supposed to go.

“He did nothing of the kind,” Truman snapped.

Other reporters began pressing him. What if the United Nations were to authorize MacArthur to launch attacks across the Yalu into Manchuria?

Truman stood erect as always, his fingertips pressing on a tabletop as he spoke. Sometimes between questions he would sip from a glass of water or twist the heavy gold Masonic ring on his left hand.

“We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.”

Did that include the atomic bomb?

“That,” said Truman unhesitatingly, “includes every weapon we have.”

Did this mean there was “active consideration” of use of the bomb?

The room was still. The topic that had never been considered appropriate for a press conference had suddenly become the focal point. Truman should have cut off discussion of the bomb before this. But he seems not to have understood where the questions were leading him, while the reporters saw no reason to refrain from pressing him, if, as it appeared, he meant to rattle the bomb a little.

“There has always been active consideration of its use,” Truman replied, adding, as he shook his head sadly, that he did not want to see it used. “It is a terrible weapon and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.”

Merriman Smith, sensing that the President had said more than he meant to, offered him a chance to back off by asking for clarification. “Did we understand you clearly that the use of the bomb is under active consideration?”

Yet Truman insisted: “Always has been. It is one of our weapons.”

Did this mean use against military objectives or civilian, another of the veteran White House press, Robert Nixon, started to ask, but Truman cut him off, saying, “It’s a matter that the military people will have to decide. I’m not a military authority that passes on those things.”

The correspondent for NBC, Frank Bourgholtzer, wished him to be more specific.

“Mr. President, you said this depends on United Nations action. Does that mean we wouldn’t use the atomic bomb except on a United Nations authorization?”

“No, it doesn’t mean that at all,” Truman shot back. “The action against Communist China depends on the action of the United Nations. The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of the weapons, as he always has.”

He had said far more than he ever intended and had been inaccurate besides, but the reporters had their story. The press conference ended at 10:30 A.M. By 10:47 a United Press bulletin was on the wire: President Truman said today that the United States has under consideration use of the atomic bomb in connection with the war in Korea. The Associated Press followed, adding that whether the bomb was used depended on American military command in the field, the clear implication being that the decision was being left to MacArthur. Huge headlines filled the early editions of the afternoon papers.

Truman’s answers had been devastatingly foolish, the press conference a fiasco. The White House was besieged with calls. An exhausted Eben Ayers, writing privately that night, would describe it as one of the “wildest days” ever. The reaction in Europe was extreme alarm, and especially in Britain, where the news threw the House of Commons into a state of panic such as old-time members had never seen. Acheson hurried to the White House with the draft of a “clarifying” statement. Charlie Ross, under greater pressure than at any time since becoming press secretary, was called into the Oval Office to lend a hand in “damage control.” The statement, ready by mid-afternoon, said that while “the use of any weapon is always implicit in the very possession of that weapon,” only the President, by law, could authorize use of the atomic bomb, and “no such authorization had been, given.” Ross, as he presented the statement, looked and sounded completely spent, the circles under his eyes deeper and darker even than usual, his voice husky. The damage, he knew, had already been done.

By late afternoon came word from London that Prime Minister Clement Attlee was on his way to “confer” with the President. “PRESIDENT WARNS WE WOULD USE ATOM BOMB IN KOREA,” said the front page of The New York Times the next morning. “NO NO NO,” ran a headline in the Times of India.

The air of crisis rapidly compounded. The next morning, Friday, December 1, Truman met with the congressional leadership in the Cabinet Room to hear Walter Bedell Smith, head of the CIA, explain before a huge map of the Soviet Union and its satellites how events in Korea related to events in Europe. The Russians, Smith reported, had just completed maneuvers involving more than half a million men and consolidated their Siberian forces under a single command, an unusual step that “deserved watching.”

There were joint State-Defense “crisis meetings” in the War Room at the Pentagon later in the day and again on Sunday, December 3, some six hours of talk.

As Acheson would write, all the President’s advisers, civilian and military, knew something was badly wrong in Korea, other than just the onslaught of the Chinese. There were questions about MacArthur’s morale, grave concern over MacArthur’s strategy and whether on the actual battlefield a “new hand” was needed to replace General Walker. It was quite clear, furthermore, that MacArthur, the Far East Commander—contrary to the President’s reassuring remarks at his press conference—had indeed deliberately disobeyed a specific order from the Joint Chiefs to use no non-Korean forces close to the Manchurian border.

But no changes in strategy were ordered. No “new hand” replaced Walker. No voices were raised against MacArthur. Regrettably, the President was ill-advised, Bradley later observed. He, Marshall, the Joint Chiefs, had all “failed the President.” Here, in a crucial few days, said Acheson later, they missed their chance to halt the march to disaster in Korea. Acheson was to lament their performance for the rest of his life. Truman would never put any blame on any of them, but Acheson would say Truman had deserved far better. “I have the unhappy conviction,” Acheson wrote nearly twenty years later, “that none of us, myself prominently included, served him as he was entitled to be served.”

Matthew Ridgway would “well remember” his mounting impatience “that dreary Sunday, December 3,” as hour after hour in the War Room discussion continued over the ominous situation in Korea.

Unable to contain himself any longer, Ridgway spoke up, saying immediate action must be taken. They owed it to the men in the field and “to the God to whom we must answer for those men’s lives,” to stop talking and do something. For the first time, Acheson later wrote, “someone had expressed what everyone thought—that the Emperor had no clothes on.” But of the twenty men who sat at the table, including Acheson, and twenty more along the walls behind, none spoke. The meeting ended without a decision.

Why didn’t the Joint Chiefs just send orders and tell MacArthur what to do, Ridgway asked General Vandenberg afterward. Because MacArthur would not obey such orders, Vandenberg replied.

Ridgway exploded. “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” he said. But Vandenberg, with an expression Ridgway remembered as both puzzled and amazed, only walked away.

The day following, in another closed session, this time at the State Department, Dean Rusk would propose that MacArthur be relieved of command. But again, no one chose to make further comment.

MacArthur, meanwhile, was being taken to task by the press, as he had never been. Time, which had long glorified him, charged him with being responsible for one of the worst military disasters in history. The “colossal military blunder” in Korea, declared an editorial in the New York Herald-Tribune, had shown that MacArthur would “no longer be accepted as the final authority on military matters.” Unused to such criticism, his immense vanity wounded, MacArthur started issuing statements of his own to the press. He denied that his strategy had precipitated the Chinese invasion and said his inability to defeat the new enemy was due to restrictions imposed by Washington that were “without precedent.”

Truman did not hold MacArthur accountable for the failure of the November offensive. But he deplored MacArthur’s way of excusing the failure, and the damage his statements could do abroad, to the degree that they implied a change in American policy. “I should have relieved General MacArthur then and there,” he would write much later.

As it was, he ordered that all military officers and diplomatic officials henceforth clear with the State Department all but routine statements before making them public, “and…refrain from direct communications on military or foreign policy with newspapers, magazines, and other publicity media.” Dated December 6, the order was widely and correctly seen as directed to MacArthur. He was still expected to express his opinions freely—it was his duty to express his opinions—but only within the councils of the government.

Truman did not relieve the Far East Commander, he later explained, because he knew no general could be a winner every day and because he did not wish to have it appear that MacArthur was being fired for failing.

What he might have done had Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs spoken up and insisted that MacArthur be relieved is another question and impossible to answer.

For now the tragedy in Korea overshadowed everything. If MacArthur was in trouble, then everything possible must be done to help. “We must get him out of it if we can,” Truman wrote in his diary late the night of December 2, following an intense session at Blair House with Acheson, Marshall, and Bradley that had left him feeling desperately low. “The conference was the most solemn one I’ve had since the Atomic Bomb conference in Berlin.”

The talk had been of evacuating all American troops—of an American Dunkirk in Korea after all. Marshall was not even sure such an operation would succeed, should the Chinese bring in their own airpower. “It looks very bad,” Truman wrote.

Yet bad as it was, there was no mood of panic, and this, as those around him would later attest, was principally because of Truman’s own unflinching response. “Mr. President, the Chinese simply must not be allowed to drive us out of Korea,” Acheson said at one point, when things looked darkest, and Truman calmly agreed. When Clement Attlee arrived in Washington and argued, in effect, that the Far East should be abandoned in order to save Europe, Truman said no.

The bloody retreat in Korea continued. Pyongyang fell “to overwhelming masses of advancing Chinese,” as the papers reported. General Walker’s Eighth Army was heading for the 38th parallel. “World War III moves ever closer,” said Life. “The Chinese Communist armies assaulting our forces…are as truly the armies of the Soviet Union as they would be if they wore the Soviet uniform.” Everywhere in Washington the talk was of the “desperateness” of the situation. Senator McCarthy called on Acheson and Marshall both to resign and talked of impeaching Truman. But Truman remained calm and steady. “I’ve had conference after conference on the jittery situation facing this country,” he wrote in his diary. “Attlee, Formosa, Communist China, Chiang Kai-shek, Japan, Germany, France, India, etc. I’ve worked for peace for five years and six months and it looks like World War III is here. I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”

When Attlee urged that no decision be made on use of the atomic bomb without prior consultation with the British government, and possibly a formal agreement, Truman declined. He would not use the bomb without consulting the British government, Truman replied, but then neither would he state that in writing. If a man’s word wasn’t any good, he said, it wasn’t made better by putting it on paper.

The goal of uniting Korea by force had been abandoned. The best hope now was to arrange an armistice back at the 38th parallel, and to this end the British agreed to help through the United Nations. On the policy that the war must not be widened, Truman and Attlee were in full agreement.

Attlee arrived in Washington on Monday, December 4. Little was said to the press about the substance of the first day’s meeting, but at the end of the second day, Tuesday, December 5, in response to the pressures on him to release something, Charlie Ross met with some forty reporters at the White House. It was early evening, and Ross, like the President and the prime minister, was planning to attend a conceit by Margaret Truman scheduled to begin in another few hours at Constitution Hall.

Limited as to how much he could say, Ross took time to describe in detail the luncheon held for the prime minister on board the Williamsburg, and with mock patience, spelled out such terms as “au jus” for the benefit of the reporters. “Charlie,” wrote Eben Ayers, “seemed in good form….”

The briefing over, Ross agreed to repeat the essence of what he had said for Frank Bourgholtzer and the NEC television crew. A microphone was set up on his desk. As he waited, Ross lit a cigarette and leaning back in his chair, smiled at his secretary, Myrtle Bergheim.

“Don’t mumble,” she kidded him.

“You know I always speak very distinctly,” he joked, then fell over sideways.

Bourgholtzer thought he was clowning. Myrtle Bergheim grabbed for the phone and called Wallace Graham, whose office was on the floor below and who immediately dashed upstairs. But Charlie Ross was already dead of a coronary occlusion.

In the tribute he wrote shortly afterward in longhand, alone at his desk in the Oval Office, Truman said:

But when Truman walked down the corridor to the press lounge where the reporters waited, he found he was unable to read what he had written. His voice broke on the first sentence.

“Ah, hell,” he said. “I can’t read this thing. You fellows know how I feel anyway…” He turned and with tears running down his face walked back to his office.

Ross had been sixty-five, a year younger than Truman. As Wallace Graham now revealed, Ross had had two or three prior mild heart attacks, but had refused to retire, preferring to remain on the job.

Concerned that the news of Ross’s death would be too upsetting for Margaret before she went on stage, Truman gave orders that she was to be told nothing until after the concert, a decision she would later resent. Had she known, she could have said something in tribute to Ross, or possibly changed her repertoire.

The President and First Lady accompanied the prime minister to Constitution Hall, where all 3,500 seats were taken, the place aglow with a “brilliant audience.” When Margaret came on stage, radiant in pink satin, and made her bow to the presidential box, Truman smiled and applauded. No President had ever been such a frequent concertgoer in Washington. He was a “regular” at Constitution Hall, at times, if the program included Mozart or Chopin, bringing the score with him. But tonight, even with his “baby” on stage, Truman looked extremely downcast.

She sang a light program that included selections from Schumann, Schubert, and a Mozart aria from The Marriage of Figaro. She drew waves of applause and was called back for four encores. A complimentary review in the Washington Times-Herald the next day would say she sang “better than ever before in her brief career.” The Mozart aria was “fresh” and “unforced,” her voice “charming.”

“Afterward, Dad was effusive, even for him,” she herself would write. “He hugged me and said he had never heard me sing better.”

But others in the audience had found the performance wanting. She was “really pretty bad that night,” recalled John Hersey. “She had a nice voice, but somebody, her coach, must have been pushing her too far.” And the Times-Herald review was not the one her father saw first thing the next morning.

At Blair House at 5:30 A.M. Truman opened the Washington Post to a review in the second section, page 12, by music critic Paul Hume. “Margaret Truman, soprano, sang in Constitution Hall last night,” it began.

It was a truly scathing review, though many of its harshest criticisms had been expressed before and Margaret, for some time now, had been advised by the Wagnerian opera star Helen Traubel not to rush her career, that her voice was as yet too small and inexperienced. Traubel, who liked Margaret and greatly admired her determination, said she needed five more years of study, at the least. When Traubel stressed this to the President, insisting that Margaret be able to stand on her own and not rely on his position, Truman, according to Traubel’s later account, banged his fist on the desk in firm agreement. “That’s exactly what I want.”

It was the timing of the review in the Post, more than what Paul Hume had said, that caused Truman to explode. If it hadn’t been the review, it might have been something else, given the stress he was under and his grief.

In the Blair House study, on a White House memo pad, he began what was to be his most notorious “longhand spasm” of all, a seething 150-word letter to Hume that he sealed in an envelope, addressed, fixed with a 3-cent stamp, and carried with him over to the White House.

To an elderly White House messenger named Samuel Mitchell, Truman asked if it was not an especially pleasant day. When Mitchell agreed, Truman suggested that he might like to take a stroll outside and on his way drop a letter in a mailbox on the street.

Had Charlie Ross still been on duty, the letter might have been stopped in time. Seeing the review, Ross would have known at once what Truman’s response would be. “Charlie Ross would never have let the Paul Hume letter get out,” George Elsey would say. “Charlie was…a calming fine influence on Truman, a tempering influence…much more than a press secretary.”

Though Hume and his editor at the Post decided to do nothing about the President’s letter, copies were apparently made and in short order it appeared in full on page 1 of the tabloid Washington News.

Margaret, who was by then in Nashville continuing her tour, refused to accept the news. She was positive, she said, that her father would not use such language. “In the first place, he wouldn’t write a letter to Mr. Hume. My father wouldn’t have time to write a letter.” It was not hard to get hold of White House notepaper, she added, though she didn’t know why anyone would do such a thing and sign her father’s name.

Privately, Truman agreed he should never have written the letter, but now that he had, he would stand by it. To Margaret he said he had the right to be two people, the President and himself. It was Harry S. Truman the human being who wrote the letter, he told her.

But to the devoted White House staff, this inclination to see himself as both Truman the President and Truman the human being was not entirely a virtue or necessarily an admirable characteristic. Truman, remembered George Elsey, would forget that the rest of the country might not make such a differentiation. “When he would write a boiling hot letter to a music critic or would call Drew Pearson a son-of-a-bitch…behaving as Harry S. Truman, not as President of the United States…this caused embarrassment to him and I think reflected on the office, which, of course, was the last thing in the world he wanted to have happen.”

Earlier embarrassing outbursts had included the angry letter to Bernard Baruch during the 1948 campaign that caused Baruch to call Truman a “rude, uncouth, ignorant man,” and a letter in which Truman had said he wouldn’t appoint John L. Lewis dog-catcher. In another, a letter to a congressman written the previous summer, he had called the Marine Corps “the Navy’s Police Force” and accused the Marines of having “a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s,” a charge for which he had publicly apologized. But nothing equaled the furor that erupted now over the Hume letter.

Hume himself, who greatly regretted that the letter had ever been made public, told reporters he was entirely sympathetic to the President. “I can only say that a man suffering the loss of a friend and carrying the burden of the present world crisis ought to be indulged in an occasional outburst of temper.” But the gesture had little dampening effect.

The Chicago Tribune put the American people on notice that their President’s “mental competence and emotional stability” were in question. A flood of letters-to-the-editor in papers across the country expressed shock over the President’s “uncouthness,” his lack of self-control. “It cuts to the quick to realize that we have a President who isn’t even a gentleman,” read one of hundreds of letters to the White House, and this from an “out-and-out” Democrat. “Truly we have chosen a ‘common’ man President. Yes—very common.” There were suggestions also that Truman might begin to take himself and his daughter a bit less seriously. “My sympathy is with you about Margaret,” wrote one man. “My four children cannot sing either.”

While some who wrote took Truman’s side, saying he had done only what any loyal, loving father worth his salt would have under the circumstances, such sentiments were in the minority. White House letters and telegrams ran nearly two to one against him and many, from mothers and fathers for whom the incident could only be seen in the context of the tragedy in Korea, voiced a deep-seated outrage that had to have touched Truman more than he ever let on.

How many of these Truman actually saw is not known. But one letter from a Mr. and Mrs. William Banning of New Canaan, Connecticut, he both saw and held on to. It had been mailed with a Purple Heart enclosed.

Truman put the letter in his desk drawer, keeping it at hand for several years.

V

It was Harry Truman’s longstanding conviction that if you did your best in life, did your “damndest” always, then whatever happened you would at least know it was not for lack of trying. But he was a great believer also in the parts played by luck and personality, forces quite beyond effort or determination. And though few presidents had ever worked so hard, or taken their responsibilities so to heart in time of crisis as Truman had since the start of the war in Korea, it was luck, good and bad, and the large influence of personality, that determined the course of events time and again, and never more so than in late December 1950, in the midst of his darkest passage.

Two days before Christmas, on an icy highway north of Seoul, General Walton Walker, commander of the Eighth Army, was killed when his jeep ran head on into an ROK Army truck. Walker’s replacement—as requested by MacArthur and approved immediately by Truman—was Matthew Ridgway, who left Washington at once, arriving in Tokyo on Christmas Day. At his meeting with MacArthur the next morning, Ridgway was told to use his own judgment at the front. “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.” MacArthur, wrote Dean Acheson later, “never uttered wiser words.”

That afternoon, Ridgway landed at Taegu, and in the weeks following came a transformation no one had thought possible. Rarely has one individual made so marked a difference in so little time. With what Omar Bradley called “brilliant, driving, uncompromising leadership,” Ridgway restored the fighting spirit of the Eighth Army and turned the tide of war as have few commanders in history.

Since the Chinese onslaught of November 28, the Eighth Army had fallen back nearly 300 miles, to a point just below the 38th parallel, and for a while, Ridgway had no choice but to continue the retreat. Press reports described U.N. forces rolling back down the two main roads through Seoul as a continuous flow morning until night. “The retreating ROK soldiers were the most miserable troops I ever saw,” wrote one correspondent. Millions of Korean refugees had also taken to the roads. “What are you going to do when the enemy doesn’t care how many men he loses?” an American officer was quoted. Seoul was in flames again. President Rhee and his government had fled to Pusan. Abandoning Seoul, Ridgway withdrew as far as Oswan, near the very point where the first green American troops had gone into action in July. Now, instead of the murderous heat of summer, they fought in murderous cold.

The mood in Washington remained bleak. MacArthur continued to urge a widening of the war—again he proposed bombing and blockading China and utilizing the troops of Chiang Kai-shek—and as before his proposals were rejected. Dire consequences would follow, he implied, unless policy were changed.

Truman found such messages “deeply disturbing.” When a general complained about the morale of his troops, observed George Marshall, the time had come for the general to look to his own morale.

The CIA was advising that it would be “infeasible under existing conditions…to hold for a protracted period a position in Korea.” The best hope was an armistice. His primary consideration, MacArthur was told, was the safety of his troops and the defense of Japan.

MacArthur called on the administration to recognize the “state of war” imposed by the Chinese, then to drop thirty to fifty atomic bombs on Manchuria and the mainland cities of China.

The Joint Chiefs, too, told Truman that mass destruction of Chinese cities with nuclear weapons was the only way to affect the situation in Korea. But that choice was never seriously considered. Truman simply refused to “go down that trail,” in Dean Rusk’s words.

Truman also still refused to reprimand MacArthur. Rather he treated MacArthur with what Acheson considered “infinite patience”—too much infinite patience, Acheson thought, having by now concluded that the general was “incurably recalcitrant” and fundamentally disloyal to the purposes of his Commander in Chief. On January 13, 1951, Truman sent MacArthur a long, thoughtful telegram, generously praising him for his “splendid leadership” and stressing again the great importance of the whole costly effort in Korea as a means “to demonstrate that aggression will not be accepted by us or by the United Nations.” But “great prudence” must be exercised, Truman stated.

Truman had by now declared a national emergency, announced emergency controls on prices and wages, and still greater defense spending—to the amount of $50 billion, more than four times the defense budget at the start of the year. He had put Charles E. Wilson, head of the General Electric Company, in charge of a new Office of Defense Mobilization, appointed General Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of NATO, and in a radio and television address to the nation on December 15, called on every citizen “to put aside his personal interests for the good of the country.” So while doing all he could to avoid a wider war, he was clearly preparing for one.

As General Marshall later attested, “We were at our lowest point.”

But then the morning of Wednesday, January 17, Marshall telephoned Truman to read an astonishing report just in from General Joe Collins, who had flown to Korea for talks with Ridgway. “Eighth Army in good shape and improving daily under Ridgway’s leadership,” Marshall read. “Morale very satisfactory…Ridgway confident he can obtain two to three months’ delay before having to initiate evacuation…. On the whole Eighth Army now in position and prepared to punish severely any mass attack.”

Plainly MacArthur’s bleak assessment of the situation, his forecasts of doom, had been wrong and the effect of this realization was electrifying. As the word spread through the upper levels of government that day, it would be remembered, one could almost hear the sighs of relief. The long retreat of the Eighth Army—the longest retreat in American military history—had ended. On January 25, 1951, less than a month after Ridgway’s arrival, the Eighth Army began “rolling forward,” as he said.

Ridgway had gone about his business with drive and common sense, seeing first to the basic needs of his troops—better food, warmer winter clothing, improved Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH units). He emphasized close communications, less dependence on roads and highways, more attention to holding the high ground, and better, more punishing use of airpower and artillery. With his own confidence, his natural vitality, his frequent and conspicuous presence at the front, dressed for battle with two hand grenades strapped to his chest, he set a strong example. The Army had been Ridgway’s life, as it had been for his father before him. He was keenly intelligent, austere, superbly fit at age fifty-six, and already celebrated as the pioneer of the airborne assault in World War II. But Ridgway also understood MacArthur. He admired MacArthur’s abilities and knew his limitations. More important, Ridgway both understood and approved of the administration’s policy. Not only did he admire Harry Truman, he thought him a great and courageous man.

In Washington, every inclination now, as Bradley would write, was to look “beyond MacArthur” to Ridgway for reliable military judgments. Until now Washington had been almost entirely dependent upon MacArthur’s headquarters for information, dependent on MacArthur’s own opinions, his strategy. Now all that was over, his influence on planning was ended, a new phase of the war had begun. As far as military operations were concerned, wrote Bradley, MacArthur had become “mainly a prima donna figurehead who had to be tolerated.”

With the Eighth Army on the offensive again, advancing relentlessly—to the Han River, to Inchon, then Seoul, retaking what was left of the capital city on March 15—morale in Washington revived. The advent of the new field commander was, as Acheson said, an event of immeasurable importance. “While General MacArthur was fighting the Pentagon, General Ridgway was fighting the enemy.”

With a force of 365,000 men, Ridgway faced an enemy of more than 480,000, but Ridgway’s use of concentrated artillery, “the really terrifying strength of our firepower,” as he said, plus the spirit of “as fine a fighting field army as our country has yet produced,” more than made up for the difference. By the end of March, having inflicted immense casualties on the Chinese, the Eighth Army was again at the 38th parallel.

Yet Ridgway’s progress seemed only to distress MacArthur further. The American ambassador in Tokyo, William Sebald, found the Far Eastern Commander “tired and depressed.” Unless he was allowed to strike boldly at the enemy, MacArthur said, his dream of a unified Korea was impossible. He complained of a “policy void.” He now proposed not only massive attacks on Manchuria, but to “sever” Korea from Manchuria by laying down a field of radioactive wastes, “the by-products of atomic manufacture,” all along the Yalu River. As so often before, his request was denied.

MacArthur’s need to upstage Ridgway verged on the ridiculous. On the eve of a new Ridgway offensive in late February, MacArthur flew to the front and standing before a dozen correspondents, while Ridgway remained in the background, declared he had “just ordered a resumption of the offensive,” when in fact he had had nothing to do with any part of the operation.

Talking to journalists on March 7, MacArthur lamented the “savage slaughter” of Americans inevitable in a war of attrition. When by the middle of March, the tide of battle “began to turn in our favor,” as Truman wrote, and Truman’s advisers both at the State Department and the Pentagon thought it time to make a direct appeal to China for peace talks, MacArthur refused to respond to inquiries on the subject. Instead he decried any “further military restrictions” on his command.

To MacArthur, as he later wrote, it appeared that Truman’s nerves were at a breaking point—“not only his nerves, but what was far more menacing in the Chief Executive of a country at war—his nerve.”

Truman ordered careful preparation of a cease-fire proposal. On March 21, the draft of a presidential statement was submitted for approval to the other seventeen U.N. nations with troops serving in Korea. On March 20 the Chiefs of Staff had informed MacArthur of what was happening—sending him what Truman called the “meat paragraphs” of the statement in a message that seems to have impressed MacArthur as nothing else had that there was indeed to be no all-out war with Red China. His response so jarred Washington as to leave a number of people wondering if perhaps he had lost his mind—first there had been Forrestal, then Louis Johnson, now MacArthur. Years afterward Bradley would speculate that possibly MacArthur’s realization that his war on China was not to be “snapped his brilliant but brittle mind.”

On the morning of Saturday, March 24, in Korea (Friday the 23rd in Washington), MacArthur, without warning, tried to seize the initiative in a manner calculated only to inflame the situation. He issued his own florid proclamation to the Chinese Communists, which in effect was an ultimatum. He began by taunting the Red Chinese for their lack of industrial power, their poor military showing in Korea against a U.N. force restricted by “inhibitions.” More seriously, MacArthur threatened to expand the war.

In conclusion, MacArthur said he personally “stood ready at any time” to meet with the Chinese commander to reach a settlement.

All Truman’s careful preparations of a cease-fire proposal were now in vain. MacArthur had cut the ground out from under him. Later MacArthur would dismiss what he had said as a “routine communiqué.” Yet his own devoted aide, General Courtney Whitney, would describe it as a bold effort to stop one of the most disgraceful plots in American history, meaning the administration’s plan to appease China.

The news reached Washington after nightfall.

MacArthur, with his “pronunciamento,” wrote Acheson, had perpetrated a major act of sabotage. To Acheson, it was “insubordination of the grossest sort”; to Bradley, an “unforgivable and irretrievable act.”

At eleven o’clock that night in Washington, Friday, March 23, Acheson, Lovett, Rusk, and two other senior State Department officials, Alexis Johnson and Lucius Battle, met at Acheson’s house in Georgetown and talked until past midnight. Lovett, ordinarily a man of imperturbable temperament, was angriest of all. MacArthur, he said, must be removed at once. Acheson agreed and quoted Euripides: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”

At Blair House, Truman sat in an upstairs study reading and rereading the text of the MacArthur ultimatum. “I couldn’t send a message to the Chinese after that,” he would say in later years, trying to recall the disappointment and fury he felt. “I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea…I was never so put out in my life…. MacArthur thought he was the proconsul for the government of the United States and could do as he damned pleased.”

In his Memoirs, Truman would write that he now knew what he must do about MacArthur.

And yet…MacArthur was not fired. Truman said not a word suggesting he had reached such a decision. At a meeting with Acheson, Lovett, and Rusk in the Oval Office the next day, Saturday the 24th, Truman, by Acheson’s account, appeared to be in a state of mind that combined “disbelief with controlled fury.” Acheson and Lovett, for all their own anger, worried about adverse public reaction, given the mood of the country and MacArthur’s immense prestige. People were fed up with the war. MacArthur was promising victory. If the President challenged that, he would appear to be, as Lovett said, “on the side of sin.” Truman’s decision was to send MacArthur only a restrained reprimand, a message he himself dictated to remind MacArthur of his order of December 6 forbidding public statements that had not been cleared with Washington.

Truman was moving with extreme caution. Some, later, would call this an act of political guile. Others would see it as another of those critical moments, like the Berlin crisis, when he drew on his better nature as President, refusing to act impulsively or irresponsibly, whatever his own feelings.

Meantime, on March 14, the Gallup Poll had reported the President’s public approval at an all-time low of only 26 percent. And by the end of March, there were appalling new statistics on the war from the U.N. Secretariat: U.N. forces had now suffered a total of 228,941 casualties, the greatest part of them by far being South Korean (168,652) and American (57,120).

Truman was dwelling on the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and General George B. McClellan during the Civil War, in the autumn of 1862, when Lincoln had been forced to relieve McClellan of command of the Army of the Potomac. Truman had sent one of his staff to the Library of Congress to review the details of the Lincoln-McClellan crisis and give him a report. Lincoln’s troubles with McClellan, as Truman knew, had been the reverse of his own with MacArthur. Lincoln had wanted McClellan to attack and McClellan refused time and again. But then, when Lincoln issued orders, McClellan, like MacArthur, ignored them. Also like MacArthur, McClellan occasionally made political statements on matters outside the military field. Asked what he thought about this, Lincoln, according to a story Truman loved, said it reminded him of the man who, when his horse kicked up and stuck a foot through the stirrup, said to the horse, “If you are going to get on, I will get off.”

On Thursday, April 5, at the Capitol, House Minority Leader Joe Martin took the floor to read the text of a letter from MacArthur that Martin said he felt duty-bound to withhold no longer.

In February, speaking in Brooklyn, Martin had called for the use of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in Korea and accused the administration of a defeatist policy. “What are we, in Korea for—to win or to lose?…If we are not in Korea to win, then this administration should be indicted for the murder of American boys.” Martin had sent a copy of the speech to MacArthur, asking for his “views.” On March 20, MacArthur had responded and virtually all that he said was bound to provoke Truman, as Martin well knew. Since MacArthur’s letter carried no stipulation of confidentiality, Martin had decided to make it public.

The congressman was right in calling for victory, MacArthur wrote, right in wanting to see Chinese forces from Formosa join the battle against communism. The real war against communism was in Asia, not in Europe: “…here [in Asia] we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words…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…. There is no substitute for victory.”

The letter was on the wires at once. At the White House, a new assistant press secretary named Roger Tubby took the ticker bulletin and rushed to the Oval Office, to find Truman sitting quietly reading General Bradley’s book, A Soldier’s Story. Truman appeared unconcerned.

“Mr. President,” said Tubby, “this man is not only insubordinate, but he’s insolent, and I think he ought to be fired.”

Truman looked again at the ticker sheet. “Well,” he said, “I think they are maneuvering the general out of a job.”

At the Pentagon, Bradley called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs. “I did not know that Truman had already made up his mind to relieve MacArthur,” Bradley remembered, “but I thought it was a strong possibility.” The Joint Chiefs, however, reached no conclusion about MacArthur.

On Friday, April 6, official Cadillacs filled the White House driveway. Marshall, Bradley, Acheson, and Harriman met with the President for an hour. Saying nothing of his own views, Truman asked what should be done. When Marshall urged caution, Acheson agreed. To Acheson it was not so much a problem of what should be done as how it should be done.

“If you relieve MacArthur,” Acheson told Truman, “you will have the biggest fight of your administration.”

Harriman, reminding the President that MacArthur had been a problem for too long, said he should be dismissed at once.

“I don’t express any opinion or make known my decision,” Truman wrote in his diary. “Direct the four to meet again Friday afternoon and go over all phases of the situation.”

He was a model of self-control. MacArthur, in his own memoirs, would describe how, having read Truman’s letter to the music critic, he saw, himself “at the apex of a situation that would make me the next victim of such uncontrolled passion.” But those close to Truman knew that “uncontrolled passion” was never a problem. Under the pressures of this tensest of times, with so much of his own stature and political welfare riding on his every move, he was at his steadiest. For the next several days an air of unnatural calm seemed to hang over the White House. “The wind died down,” remembered Joe Martin. “The surface was placid…nothing happened.”

Truman telephoned the Vice President. Given all that had happened, Barkley concluded reluctantly, a compromise was out of the question—MacArthur would have to go. When Truman called Chief Justice Vinson and Speaker Sam Rayburn to the Oval Office, Vinson, like Marshall, advised caution. What Rayburn said is not known.

On Saturday, Truman met again with Marshall, Acheson, Bradley, and Harriman, and again nothing, was resolved. Marshall and Bradley were still uncertain what to do. They were hesitating in part, according to Bradley’s later account, because they knew the kind of abuse that would be hurled at them personally—an understandable concern for two such men at the end of long, distinguished careers. The previous fall, in acrimonious Senate debate over Marshall’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense, Republican William E. Jenner of Indiana had called Marshall “a front man for traitors” and a “living lie.” Firing MacArthur now, wrote Bradley, was certain to provoke more such savage assaults on Marshall by those Acheson called the “political primitives.” Nor could he, Bradley, expect to escape similar treatment.

On Monday, April 9, the same foursome convened with the President once more, this time at Blair House. But now the situation had changed. The Joint Chiefs had met the afternoon before and concluded that from a military point of view, MacArthur should be relieved. Their opinion was unanimous.

“There was no question about the Chiefs being in thorough agreement on this,” Bradley’s aide, Colonel Chester Clifton, would later say:

Now at Blair House, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Harriman all agreed that MacArthur should be relieved, and only after each had spoken, Truman, for the first time, said he was of the same opinion. He had made his decision. He told Bradley to prepare the necessary papers.

“Rarely had a matter been shrouded in such secrecy at the White House,” reported the Washington Post the morning of Tuesday, April 10. “The answer to every question about MacArthur was met with a ‘no comment’ reply.”

On Capitol Hill, an unidentified “congressional official” told the Post that the President had decided against removing the Far East Commander. Representative Martin said he favored bringing MacArthur home to report to Congress. In Tokyo, according to a United Press dispatch, a member of MacArthur’s staff said meetings between the general and Secretary of the Army Pace were “going forward with an air of cordiality”—thus seeming to refute rumors that Pace had been sent to dismiss MacArthur. A photograph on page 1 of the Post showed a smiling MacArthur welcoming an even more smiling Pace on his arrival at the Tokyo airport.

A Post editorial, meantime, expressed concern that MacArthur’s repeated efforts “to run away with the diplomatic ball” had “excited little more than a ripple among the American people,” and blamed the administration for its “muting” of the issue. Civil supremacy was at stake. The President ought to take a firm hand. “Any reassertion of the President’s authority as Commander in Chief and initiator of the country’s foreign policy would win him, we feel sure, the support of the American people. That’s what they are crying out for—leadership….”

The morning cartoon by Herb Block showed “Captain Harry Truman” asleep on his World War I army cot, trembling in fear, too terrified to challenge the five-star general.

At the end of a routine morning staff meeting, the President quietly announced—“So you won’t have to read about it in the papers”—that he had decided to fire General MacArthur. He was sure, Truman added, that MacArthur had wanted to be fired.

He was sure also that he himself faced a political storm, “a great furor,” unlike any in his political career. From beyond the office windows, the noise of construction going on in the White House was so great that several of the staff had to strain to hear what he was saying.

At 3:15 that afternoon, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Harriman reported to the Oval Office, bringing the drafted orders. Truman looked them over, borrowed a fountain pen from Bill Hassett, and signed his name.

They were to be sent by State Department channels to Ambassador Muccio in Korea, who was to turn them over to Secretary Pace, who by now was also in Korea, with Ridgway at Eighth Army headquarters. Pace was to return at once to Tokyo and personally hand the orders to MacArthur—this whole relay system having been devised to save the general from the embarrassment of direct transmission through regular Army communications. All aspects of the issue thus far had been kept secret with marked success, but it was essential there be no leaks in the last critical hours, as Truman made clear to his new press secretary, Joe Short, the White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun whom Truman had picked to replace Charlie Ross. Announcement of the sensational MacArthur news was not to be made until the following morning.

The next several hours passed without incident, until early evening, after Truman had returned to Blair House. Harriman, Bradley, Rusk, and six or seven of Truman’s staff were working in the Cabinet Room, preparing material for release, when Joe Short received word that a Pentagon reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Lloyd Norman, was making inquiries about a supposed “major resignation” to take place in Tokyo—the implication being that somehow MacArthur had already learned of Truman’s decision and was about to resign before Truman could fire him.

Bradley telephoned Truman at about nine o’clock to report there had been a leak. Truman, saying he wanted time to think, told Bradley to find Marshall and Acheson. Marshall, it was learned, had gone to a movie with his wife, but Acheson came to the White House immediately, and like Rusk and George Elsey, he thought it would be a mistake to do anything rash because of one reporter’s inquiry. As he had from the start, Acheson again stressed the importance of the manner in which the general was dismissed. It was only fair and proper that he be informed before the story broke.

Harriman, Charlie Murphy, Matt Connelly, Joe Short, and Roger Tubby argued that MacArthur must not be allowed to “get the jump” on the President. The story must come from the White House, not Tokyo. The announcement should be made that night.

Such a decision, thought Elsey, would look like panic on the part of the White House. It would be undignified, unbefitting the President. But as Elsey later recalled, “There was a degree of panic.”

Meantime, something apparently had gone wrong with the transmission of the President’s orders. Nothing had been heard from Muccio about their receipt.

Had George Marshall been present that night—or Charlie Ross—possibly things would have been handled differently.

Truman would remember Bradley “rushing over” to Blair House at a late hour. Actually, the time was just after ten and Bradley came accompanied by Harriman, Rusk, Joe Short, and Matt Connelly. By 10:30, Truman had decided.

Short telephoned Roger Tubby at the White House to have all the orders—those relieving MacArthur, as well as those naming Matthew Ridgway his successor—mimeographed as quickly as possible.

“He’s not going to be allowed to quit on me,” Truman is reported to have said. “He’s going to be fired!” In his diary, Truman recorded dryly, “Discussed the situation and I ordered messages sent at once and directly to MacArthur.”

From a small first-floor study in his Georgetown home, Dean Acheson began placing calls to Tom Connally, Les Biffle, and John Foster Dulles, to tell them what was about to happen. At the State Department, Rusk spent a long night telephoning the ambassadors of all the countries with troops in Korea. “Well, the little man finally did it, didn’t he,” responded the ambassador from New Zealand.

At the White House, switchboard operators began calling reporters at their homes to say there would be an extraordinary press conference at 1:00 A.M. And at 1:00 A.M. in the White House press room, Wednesday, April 11, Press Secretary Short handed out the mimeographed sheets.

Truman, in his second-floor bedroom at Blair House, was by then fast asleep.

General MacArthur learned of his recall while at lunch in Tokyo, when his wife handed him a brown Signal Corps envelope.

If Truman had only let him know how he felt, MacArthur would say privately a few hours later, he would have retired “without difficulty.” Where the Tribune reporter got his tip was never learned. MacArthur would later testify that he had never given any thought to resigning.

According to what MacArthur had been told by an unnamed but “eminent” medical authority, Truman’s “mental instability” was the result of malignant hypertension, “characterized by bewilderment and confusion of thought.” Truman, MacArthur predicted, would be dead in six months.

Truman Fires Macarthur

The headline across the early edition of the Washington Post, April 11, 1951, was the headline everywhere in the country and throughout much of the world, with only minor variations. The reaction was stupendous, the outcry from the American people shattering. Truman had known he would have to face a storm, but however dark his premonitions, he could not possibly have measured what was coming. No one did, no one could have. One southern senator in the course of the day described the people in his part of the country as “almost hysterical.” The senator himself was almost hysterical. So were scores of others on Capitol Hill and millions of Americans.

The day on Capitol Hill was described as “one of the bitterest…in modern times.” Prominent Republicans, including Senator Taft, spoke angrily of impeaching the President. The full Republican leadership held an angry emergency meeting in Joe Martin’s office at 9:30 in the morning, after which Martin talked to reporters of “impeachments,” the accent on the plural. “We might want the impeachments of 1 or 50.” A full-dress congressional investigation of the President’s war policy was in order. General MacArthur, announced Martin, would be invited to air his views before a joint session of Congress.

Senator Nixon demanded MacArthur’s immediate reinstatement. Senator Jenner declared the country was “in the hands of a secret coterie” directed by Russian spies. When, on the floor of the Senate, Jenner shouted, “Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction,” the gallery broke into applause.

A freshman Democrat from Oklahoma, Senator Robert Kerr, rose to defend the President. If the Republicans believed the nation’s security depended on following the policy of General MacArthur, Kerr said, then they should call for a declaration of war against Red China. Otherwise, Republican support of MacArthur was a mockery. Tom Connally reminded his colleagues that Americans had always insisted on civilian control over the military, and three Senate Republicans, Duff of Pennsylvania, Saltonstall and Lodge of Massachusetts, spoke in agreement.

But such voices were lost in a tempest of Republican outrage. The general’s dismissal was “another Pearl Harbor,” a “great day for the Russian Communists.” MacArthur had been fired “because he told the truth.” “God help the United States,” said Senator James P. Kem, Republican of Missouri.

In New York two thousand longshoremen walked off their jobs in protest over the firing of MacArthur. A Baltimore women’s group announced plans for a march on Washington in support of the general. Elsewhere enraged patriots flew flags at half-staff, or upside down. People signed petitions, fired off furious letters and telegrams to Washington. In Worcester, Massachusetts, and San Gabriel, California, Truman was burned in effigy. In Houston, a Protestant minister became so angry dictating a telegram to the White House that he died of a heart attack.

The legislatures of four states—Florida, Michigan, Illinois, and California—voted resolutions condemning the President’s action, while the Los Angeles City Council adjourned for a day of “sorrowful contemplation of the political assassination of General MacArthur.” In Chicago, in a front editorial, the Tribune called for immediate impeachment proceedings:

“IMPEACH THE IMBECILE”…“IMPEACH THE LITTLE WARD POLITICIAN STUPIDITY FROM KANSAS CITY”…“SUGGEST YOU LOOK FOR ANOTHER HISS IN BLAIR HOUSE,” read telegrams typical of those pouring into Washington. In the hallways of the Senate and House office buildings, Western Union messengers made their deliveries with bushel baskets. According to one tally, of the 44,358 telegrams received by Republicans in Congress during the first 48 hours following Truman’s announcement, all but 334 condemned him or took the side of MacArthur, and the majority called for Truman’s immediate removal from office.

Republicans were overjoyed. “This is the biggest windfall that has ever come to the Republican Party,” exclaimed Senator Styles Bridges.

A number of prominent liberals—Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, Justice William O. Douglas—publicly supported Truman. Douglas, who had told Truman as early as October that MacArthur should be fired, wrote, “In the days ahead you may need the strength of all your friends. This note is to let you know that I am and will be in your corner…I know you are right.”

While by far the greatest clamor came from those in the country outraged over what Truman had done, there was no lack of conviction, even passion, among people who felt he was in the right, that a fundamental principle was at stake. And to many of these same people, how one felt about Harry Truman personally was immaterial.

“It makes not the slightest difference if Mr. Harry Truman is an ignorant person who never graduated from college, who once worked in a haberdashery shop, who was a protégé of one of our worst city bosses and came into the presidency through accident,” the Reverend Dr. Duncan E. Littlefair said in a sermon at the Fountain Street Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Another letter of support addressed to the President came from the Washington Post music critic, Paul Hume.

Throughout Europe, MacArthur’s dismissal was greeted as welcome news. “MAC IS SACKED,” declared the London Evening Standard. The French, reported Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, were “solidly for Truman.” Not a single paper in Paris had failed to support his decision.

But most impressive was the weight of editorial opinion at home, despite vehement assaults in the McCormick, Hearst, and Scripps-Howard newspapers, or the renewed glorification of MacArthur in Henry Luce’s Time and Life.

The Washington post, The New York Times, the New York Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal, the Miami Daily News, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Denver Post, the Seattle Times, the Christian Science Monitor, all these and more endorsed Truman’s decision. Importantly the list also included such staunch Republican papers as the Des Moines Register and Tribune and the New York Herald-Tribune, which went out of its way to praise Truman as well for his strength of character:

In his “Today and Tomorrow” column, Walter Lippmann commended Truman and Marshall both for having “done their duty.” And the working press, according to the Saturday Review, privately sided with Truman by a margin of six to one, though most reporters thought the dismissal had been poorly handled.

The clamor in the country, the outrage, the noisy hostility to Truman, the adulation of MacArthur continued, however, and would grow greater still when MacArthur made his triumphal return. Nothing had so stirred the political passions of the country since the Civil War.

At the heart of the tumult was anger and frustration over the war in Korea. Nobody liked it. Senator Wherry had begun calling it “Truman’s War,” and the name caught on. People were sick of Truman’s War, frustrated and a bit baffled by talk of a “limited war.” America didn’t fight to achieve a stalemate, and the cost in blood had become appalling. If it was a United Nations effort, then the United States seemed to be bearing the heavy side of the burden. According to the latest figures, there were more than ten thousand Americans dead, another fifty thousand wounded or missing in action. The country wanted it over. MacArthur at least offered victory.

To a great part of the country MacArthur was a glorious figure, a real-life, proven American hero, the brilliant, handsome general who had led American forces to stunning triumph in the greatest of all wars wherein there had never been any objective but complete and total victory. “Douglas MacArthur was the personification of the big man…Harry Truman was almost a professional little man,” wrote Time in a considerably less than unbiased attempt to appraise the national mood, but one that nonetheless applied to a large part of the populace. For someone of Truman’s modest attainments, a man of his “stature,” to have fired Douglas MacArthur seemed to many Americans an act smacking of insolence and vindictiveness, not to say dreadful judgment. Nor did the way it happened seem right. Reportedly, the firing had been carefully timed so as to make the morning papers “and catch the Republicans in bed.” Rumors also attributed the announcement to another of Truman’s dead-of-the-night temper tantrums, or heavy drinking. In a speech in Milwaukee, having called Truman a “son-of-a-bitch,” Joe McCarthy charged that the decision had been influenced by “bourbon and Benedictine.” Even to more fair-minded Republicans than McCarthy and others of the party’s vociferous right wing—as to a great many Democrats—it seemed to have been a graceless, needlessly unkind way to terminate a great career. Who did “little Harry Truman” think he was?

Old admirers of Franklin Roosevelt speculated on how differently “the master politician” might have handled things—made MacArthur ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, perhaps.

But in a larger way, for many, the firing of MacArthur was yet another of those traumatic turns of events of recent years—like the fall of China to Communist control, like the advent of the Russian bomb—that seemed to signal a world out of joint, a world increasingly hard to understand and threatening.

According to a Gallup Poll, 69 percent of the country backed General MacArthur. The fact that the country and nearly every leading Republican had strongly supported Truman’s decision to go into Korea the previous June, the fact that in November MacArthur, the supreme military strategist, had presided over one of the worst debacles in American military history, or that only 30 percent of the country expressed a willingness to go to war with China, were all overlooked.

Truman was not to appear at a big public event until April 20—not until after MacArthur had made his return and appeared before Congress—and when he did, to throw out the first ball at the opening game at Griffith Stadium, he was booed to his face, something that had not happened since Herbert Hoover attended a ball game in 1931.

Except for a brief broadcast from the White House the night following his dismissal of MacArthur, April 11, Truman had maintained silence on the matter. General MacArthur was “one of our greatest military commanders,” he told the nation, but the cause of world peace was far more important than any single individual.

He went about his schedule as though all were normal. On April 13, he had his picture taken as, smiling confidently, he began his seventh year in the Oval Office. One evening he and Bess went to the theater, another to see a British film of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman.

MacArthur landed at San Francisco Tuesday, April 17, to a delirious reception. He had been away from the country for fourteen years. Until now, the American people had had no chance to see and cheer him, to welcome the hero home. Ten thousand were at the San Francisco airport. So great were the crowds on the way into the city, it took two hours for the motorcade to reach his hotel. “The only politics I have,” MacArthur told a cheering throng, “is contained in a simple phrase known to all of you—God Bless America.”

When Truman met with reporters the next day, April 18, at his first ‘press conference since the start of the crisis, he dashed all their expectations by refusing to say anything on the subject. Scheduled to appear before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on Thursday, April 19, the day MacArthur was to go before Congress, Truman canceled his speech, because he felt it should be the general’s day and did not wish anything to detract from it.

Only in a few personal letters did Truman touch on the matter, and then briefly, simply, and without apologies or complicated explanations. “I was sorry to have to reach a parting of the way with the big man in Asia,” he wrote to Eisenhower, “but he asked for it and I had to give it to him.”

There would be “hell to pay” for it for perhaps six or seven weeks, he told his staff and the Cabinet. But eventually people would come to their senses, including more and more Republican politicians who would grow doubtful of all-out support for the general. Given some time, MacArthur would be reduced to human proportions. Meanwhile, Truman could withstand the bombardment, for in the long run, he knew, he would be judged to have made the right decision. He had absolutely no doubt of that. “The American people will come to understand that what I did had to be done.”

As a boost for failing spirits, someone circulated among the White House staff a mock “Schedule for Welcoming General MacArthur” to Washington:

As it was, a cheering crowd of twelve thousand people waited until past midnight at National Airport to welcome MacArthur when his plane landed.

Secretary Marshall, General Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs were at the foot of the ramp to greet him, as Truman had agreed was only proper. But so also was Major General Vaughan, whose presence may have been Truman’s idea of a small joke of his own.

At 12:31 P.M., Thursday, April 19, in a flood of television lights, Douglas MacArthur walked down the same aisle in the House of Representatives as had Harry Truman so often since 1945, and the wild ovation from the packed chamber, the intense, authentic drama of the moment, were such as few had ever beheld.

Neither the President’s Cabinet, nor the Supreme Court, nor any of the Joint Chiefs were present.

Wearing a short “Eisenhower” jacket, without decoration, the silvery circles of five-star rank glittering on his shoulders, MacArthur paused to shake hands with Vice President Barkley, then stepped to the rostrum, his face “an unreadable mask.” Only after complete silence had fallen did he begin.

“I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country.”

There was ringing applause and the low, vibrant voice continued, the speaker in full command of the moment.

The decision to intervene in support of the Republic of Korea had been sound from a military standpoint, MacArthur affirmed. But when he had called for reinforcements, he was told they were not available. He had “made clear,” he said, that if not permitted to destroy the enemy bases north of the Yalu, if not permitted to utilize the 800,000 Chinese troops on Formosa, if not permitted to blockade the China coast, then “the position of the command from a military standpoint forbade victory….” And war’s “very object” was victory. How could it be otherwise? “In war, indeed,” he said, repeating his favorite slogan, “there can be no substitute for victory. There were some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They were blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches, with unmistakable emphasis, that appeasement begets new and bloodier war.”

He was provocative, and defiant. Resounding applause or cheers followed again and again—thirty times in thirty-four minutes. He said nothing of bombing China’s industrial centers, as he had proposed. And though he said “every available means” should be applied to bring victory, he made no mention of his wish to use atomic bombs, or to lay down a belt of radioactivity along the Yalu. He had been severely criticized for his views, he said. Yet, he asserted, his views were “fully shared” by the Joint Chiefs—a claim that was altogether untrue and that brought a deafening ovation. Republicans and most spectators in the galleries leaped to their feet, cheering and stamping. It was nearly a minute before he could begin again.

To those who said American military strength was inadequate to face the enemy on more than one front, MacArthur said he could imagine no greater expression of defeatism. “You cannot appease or otherwise surrender to Communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.” To confine the war to Chinese aggression in Korea only was to follow a path of “prolonged indecision.”

“Why, my soldiers asked of me, surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?” He paused, then, softly, his voice almost a whisper, he said, “I could not answer.”

A record 30 million people were watching on television and the performance was masterful. The use of the rich voice, the timing, surpassed that of most actors. The oratorical style was of a kind not heard in Congress in a very long time. It recalled, as one television critic wrote, “a yesteryear of the theater,” and it held the greater part of the huge audience wholly enraptured. Work had stopped in offices and plants across the country, so people could watch. Saloons and bars were jammed. Schoolchildren saw the “historic hour” in classrooms or were herded into assemblies or dining halls to listen by radio. Whether they had any idea what the excitement was about, they knew it was “important.”

“When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams,” MacArthur said, his voice dropping as he began the famous last lines, the stirring, sentimental, ambiguous peroration that the speech would be remembered for.

A “hurricane of emotion” swept the room. Hands reached out to him. Many in the audience were weeping. “We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!” exclaimed Republican Representative Dewey Short of Missouri, a former preacher. To Joe Martin, it was “the climaxing” of the most emotional moment he had known in thirty-five years in Congress. Theatrics were a part of the congressional way of life, Martin knew, but nothing had ever equaled this.

It was MacArthur’s finest hour, and the crescendo of public adulation that followed, beginning with a triumphal parade through Washington that afternoon, and climaxing the next day in New York with a thunderous ticker-tape parade, was unprecedented in American history. Reportedly 7,500,000 people turned out in New York, more than had welcomed Eisenhower in 1945, more even than at the almost legendary welcome for Lindbergh in 1927. It was “awesome,” wrote Time. “Everybody cheered…a man of chin-out affirmation, who seemed a welcome contrast to men of indecision and negation.”

But, in fact, not everybody cheered. There were places along the parade route in New York where, as MacArthur’s open car passed, people stood silently, just watching and looking, anything but pleased. In Washington, one senator had confided to a reporter that he had never feared more for his country than during MacArthur’s speech. “I honestly felt that if the speech had gone on much longer there might have been a march on the White House.” Even Time noted that while Republicans in Congress might consider MacArthur a godsend, few were ready to endorse his proposals.

Truman had not listened to MacArthur’s speech, or watched on television. He had spent the time at his desk in the Oval Office, meeting with Dean Acheson as usual at that hour on Thursdays, after which he went back to Blair House for lunch and a nap. At some point, however, he did read what MacArthur had said. Speaking privately, he remarked that he thought it “a bunch of damn bullshit.”

As Truman had anticipated, the tumult began to subside. For seven weeks in the late spring of 1951, the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees held joint hearings to investigate MacArthur’s dismissal. Chaired by Democratic Senator Richard B. Russell, the inquiry opened on May 3 in the same marble Caucus Room, 318 of the Senate Office Building, where the Truman Committee had conducted its sessions. Though the hearings were closed, authorized transcripts of each day’s sessions, edited for military security reasons, were released hourly to the press.

MacArthur, the first witness, testified for three days, arguing that his way in Korea was the way to victory and an end to the slaughter. He had seen as much blood and disaster as any man alive, he told the senators, but never such devastation as during his last time in Korea. “After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited. Now are you going to let that go on…?” The politicians in Washington had introduced a “new concept into military operations—the concept of appeasement,” its purpose only “to go on indefinitely…indecisively, fighting with no mission….”

But he also began to sound self-absorbed and oddly disinterested in global issues. He would admit to no mistakes, no errors of judgment. Failure to anticipate the size of the Chinese invasion, for example, had been the fault of the CIA. Any operation he commanded was crucial, other considerations were always of less importance. Certain that his strategy of war on China would not bring in the Soviets, he belittled the danger of a larger conflict. But what if he happened to be wrong, he was asked. What if another world war resulted? That, said MacArthur, was not his responsibility. “My responsibilities were in the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various agencies of the Government are working night and day for an over-all solution to the global problem. Now I am not familiar with their studies. I haven’t gone into it….” To many, it seemed he had made the President’s case.

The great turning point came with the testimony of Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs, who refuted absolutely MacArthur’s claim that they agreed with his strategy. Truman, from the start of the crisis, had known he needed the full support of his military advisers before declaring his decision on MacArthur. Now it was that full support, through nineteen days of testimony, that not only gave weight and validity to the decision, but discredited MacArthur in a way nothing else could have.

Speaking solemnly, Marshall began by saying it was “a very distressing necessity, a very distressing occasion that compels me to appear here this morning and in effect in almost direct opposition to a great many views and actions of General MacArthur. He is a brother Army officer, a man for whom I have tremendous respect….”

The administration was not turning its back on an easy victory in Korea, Marshall said, because there could be no easy or decisive victory in Korea short of another world war. The present policy might indeed seem costly, but not compared to an atomic war. There had been complaints of stalemate, demands for quick, decisive solutions at the time of the Berlin crisis, too, he reminded the senators. The war in Korea was in its tenth month, but the Berlin crisis had lasted almost fifteen months before ending in a “notable victory.”

Just what did Secretary Marshall consider the “Korean business,” he was asked. “A police action? A large or small war?…”

“I would characterize it as a limited war which I hope will remain limited,” Marshall replied evenly.

Bradley, his first day in the witness chair, testified with unexpected vigor and delivered a telling blow with what would be the most quoted line of the hearings. MacArthur’s program to step up and widen the war with China, Bradley said, would “involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

Never, said the Joint Chiefs, had they subscribed to MacArthur’s plan for victory, however greatly they admired him.

From a purely military standpoint, General Collins was asked, had General MacArthur’s conduct of the war in Korea been compatible with General MacArthur’s outstanding conduct of the war in the Pacific from 1941 to 1945? That, said Collins, was a question he would prefer not to answer, and no one insisted.

The dismissal of MacArthur, said all of them—Marshall, Bradley, the Joint Chiefs—was more than warranted, it was a necessity. Given the circumstances, given the seriousness of MacArthur’s opposition to the policy of the President, his challenge to presidential authority, said Marshall, there had been “no other course but to relieve him.”

The fidelity of the military high command to the principle of civilian control of the military was total and unequivocal.

Such unanimity of opinion on the part of the country’s foremost and most respected military leaders seemed to leave Republican senators stunned. As James Reston wrote in The New York Times, “MacArthur, who had started as the prosecutor, had now become the defendant.”

The hearings ground on and grew increasingly dull. The MacArthur hysteria was over, interest waned. When in June, MacArthur set off on a speaking tour through Texas, insisting he had no presidential ambitions, he began to sound more and more shrill and vindictive, less and less like a hero. He attacked Truman, appeasement, high taxes, and “insidious forces working from within.” His crowds grew steadily smaller. Nationwide, the polls showed a sharp decline in his popular appeal. The old soldier was truly beginning to fade away.

The furor of the MacArthur crisis had taken a heavy toll. It had spread confusion and increasing doubt about the war in Korea, increasing skepticism about the leadership in Washington and particularly about the President himself. Politically, the damage to the administration and to the Democratic Party had been serious. Even among Truman’s strongest supporters, he was criticized for both the way the dismissal had been handled and for failing to convince the country that he was right. Where was the eloquence, the power of “the bully pulpit” of the presidency when it was so desperately needed? “Having made this courageous decision, Truman failed to mobilize the country behind him,” Bradley would write in retrospect. Truman’s address to the nation the night of the MacArthur dismissal had been, in Bradley’s estimate, “a complete flop.”

A Gallup Poll in late May showed that while support for MacArthur had dropped to 30 percent, support for Marshall and Bradley was only 19 percent, and three out of four of those polled regarded the MacArthur hearings as “just politics.”

Many then, and more in time to come, would say that Truman’s biggest mistake had been not firing the general months before, a view with which Truman himself wholeheartedly concurred.

Truman would regard the decision as among the most important he made as President. He did not, however, agree with those who said it had shown what great courage he had. (Harriman, among others, would later speak of it as one of the most courageous steps ever taken by any President.) “Courage didn’t have anything to do with it,” Truman would say emphatically. “General MacArthur was insubordinate and I fired him. That’s all there was to it.”

But if the firing of MacArthur had taken a heavy toll politically, if Truman as President had been less than a master of persuasion, he had accomplished a very great deal and demonstrated extraordinary patience and strength of character in how he rode out the storm. His policy in Korea—his determined effort to keep the conflict in bounds—had not been scuttled, however great the aura of the hero-general, or his powers as a spellbinder. The principle of civilian control over the military, challenged as never before in the nation’s history, had survived, and stronger than ever. The President had made his point and, with the backing of his generals, he had made it stick.

“Truman’s conflict with MacArthur,” wrote Dean Rusk, “was more than a clash of egos or contest of wills; Truman was concerned about the presidency…. I am convinced that 95 percent of Truman’s decision to fire MacArthur hinged on the relationship of the president as the Commander in Chief to his general and on civilian control of the military.”

MacArthur did truly believe that he was above the President. MacArthur himself later told the historian Samuel Eliot Morison that a theater commander should be allowed to act independently, with no orders from the President, the United Nations, or anyone; then, to be sure that there could be no mistaking his meaning, MacArthur repeated the statement.

President Harry S. Truman was President and Commander in Chief still, and he was Harry S. Truman still, anything but disconsolate or defeated. Already, before the Senate hearings ended, he had reemerged and begun fighting back in his own way, sounding often as he had in the 1948 campaign. Speaking at an Armed Forces Day dinner on May 18 at the Statler, Truman reminded his full-dress audience that even as “we sit here tonight…partaking of food on white tablecloths and enjoying ourselves…there are men fighting and dying…to reach that peace for which we have been striving since World War II…. You must quit your bickering here at home…you must quit playing petty politics….”

Of the war in Korea, he said, “We are fighting for time…for us. There is always an emphasis on the casualties in Korea…. But did it ever occur to you that [they] will be one small drop in the bucket from one of those horrible bombs of which we talk so much.

“Think—think—think,” he said, his voice low, almost shaking, “what a responsibility your President faces. If you would think, and think clearly, you would get behind me and help win this peace…. It is up to you.”

If “victory” in Korea meant risking a world war—a war of atomic bombs—Truman would settle for no victory in Korea. That was the line he had drawn. There was a substitute for victory: it was peace. And he would stand by his policy of limited war for that specific objective.

“And look at the alternatives these critics have to present,” he said in a speech at Tullahoma, Tennessee.

In the same speech, delivered June 25, almost a year to the day since his decision to go into Korea, he said, in effect, that he was ready to negotiate a settlement of the war at the 38th parallel.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Jacob Malik, had just proposed a Korean armistice. At Tullahoma, Truman gave the Soviets his fast answer.

“We are ready to join in a peaceful settlement in Korea now, just as we have always been.”