The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (27 page)

What would become ever more clear in retrospect about those years was that Truman and his administration had spanned a critical moment in American history. America was changing, like it or not, from the America that had been, that is, the America that was powerful but did not yet know it and was hesitant to use its industrial muscularity internationally, to the America that would be America the superpower. The ongoing debates over the future, the battle within the administration over NSC 68, and even the ugliness of the McCarthy period itself were in a way manifestations of that dramatic change. These were caused in effect by growing pains. Franklin Roosevelt had been president during the climb to power, and he had died on the cusp of the final moment, the victory over Germany. The Truman years, with all the conflict
over defense spending, with in the beginning only a relatively small elite pushing for a new kind of military and economic alliance with the Western democracies in Europe, and with an ever more powerful domestic undertow pulling against that same internationalism, were when it had all been fought out. Truman was the first president who had to deal with the consequences and contradictions of the great victory in World War II, and the power (and responsibility) it bequeathed to his country. He not only had to marshal the government behind a new kind of internationalism but had to deal with a volatile, sometimes hostile, domestic political reaction as the nation slowly began to accept its new responsibilities. The choice was a basic one, between greater internationalism or continued isolation—and, perhaps equally important, how much the country was willing to pay. It is against that background, and Truman’s belief in the primacy of a strong, democratic Europe allied with the United States, that the fall of China, the rise of Mao, and in time the Korean War, and the political forces they unleashed at home, should be viewed.

Dean Acheson was the most important player in the debate over NSC 68, the man at the center of it all. It was a debate that was not really a debate in any larger public sense, but more of a struggle of different forces colliding within the bureaucracy on the question of what America should do in its postwar incarnation—how great a power it should become and how much of the traditional British role of the leader of the West it should take over. Even before he became secretary of state, Acheson was in the process of becoming the most important national security player of the era, quite possibly of the next fifty years, and the single most important architect of the policies that became central to America’s leadership of the Western powers, as well as its containment of and coexistence with the Soviet Union. Some four decades later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, largely of its own weight and the failure of its economy to function in any modern capacity, there was in the media an immediate instinct to give most of the credit to Ronald Reagan, who had helped push a partially bankrupt adversary to the brink of economic collapse. But more properly the credit for the policies of the West belonged to a long line of American political leaders who had helped hold off Soviet advances in Europe, principal among them Acheson.

The era in which he served, the most critical and important years of the Cold War, in which America’s principal postwar alliances were formed, driven by a formidable new need for collective security, could easily and without exaggeration be known as the Age of Acheson. No non-president dominated American foreign policy decision-making in that period as he did. George Marshall had given his greatest years to the period that ended with World War II, and was exhausted in the years immediately following, his health beginning
to decline. After the death of Forrestal, no one from the Defense Department loomed as large on the landscape. Acheson, more than anyone else, with the debacle of the post–World War I policies fresh in his mind, was vital to creating the military and economic alliances that solidified the West, linking the United States with Europe as never before. Not by chance did he, somewhat immodestly, title his memoir
Present at the Creation
.

Of what American policy should be at that moment as the British flag was being lowered, certainly Acheson had the clearest vision. He was the ultimate Europe Firster. Because of that he was also the principal target for those who in different ways were unhappy with that course, either because they loathed the New Deal, or disliked the British, or were deeply isolationist, or were Asia (and China) Firsters. He was very much a man of a ruling elite, who had no doubts about his own right to chart a course (or that it was the right one). But the vision that was so clear to him and men like him had not yet been accepted by a broad spectrum in the country, the millions of Americans who hoped for an old-fashioned normalcy. That made for a great many contradictions in the American outlook toward the rest of the world. The foreign policy of the United States in the years right after the war, Dean Acheson once noted, “could be summed up in three sentences: 1. Bring the boys home; 2. Don’t be Santa Claus; 3. Don’t be pushed around.”

He worked, from the start, in a political combat zone. Acheson had become secretary of state on January 21, 1949, the day after Truman’s inauguration. Even before he was named secretary he had been a red flag for the Republicans. The confirmation hearings when he was named undersecretary of state had been unusually difficult and cantankerous, almost a trip wire for the escalating confrontation between the administration and the Republican right wing. There had always been a feeling on the part of the China Firsters that Acheson was their sworn enemy and thus MacArthur’s too, that Acheson had been out to clip the general’s wings—which was largely true. (When MacArthur had announced that he had more troops than he needed, it was Acheson who had taken him on, saying the occupation authorities were not the architects of policy but only “the instruments of it,” a statement that had greatly angered MacArthur.) Because of that, there had been a surprising amount of bad feeling during the first confirmation fight. A number of very conservative Republicans had opposed Acheson’s nomination as undersecretary because he had, as Senator Kenneth Wherry charged, “blighted the name of MacArthur.” Twelve senators voted for Wherry’s move to recommit the nomination, but it was quickly defeated and Acheson approved, 69–1. What was at the heart of the resentment, Acheson later said, was Truman’s relationship with MacArthur. “If we could have seen into the future,” Acheson wrote twenty-four years later, “we
would have recognized this skirmish as the beginning of a struggle leading to the relief of MacArthur from his command on April 11, 1951.”

In the new, more partisan era, Acheson became the perfect target for the administration’s most conservative critics. That he was attacked by his critics as being a figure on the left was ironic and reflected something about the times. “Only in the heat-distorted vision of Cold War America could Acheson be seen other than as what he was: an ‘enlightened conservative’ to use a barbarous and patronizing phrase,” noted I. F. Stone, who wrote from the left. “Who remembered in these days of McCarthy that Acheson, on making his Washington debut at the Treasury, had been denounced by New Dealers as a Wall Street Trojan Horse, a borer-from-within on behalf of the big bankers?”

Acheson possessed, as he was well aware, a formidable intellect, and to go along with it a comparable and equally powerful sense of rectitude, one that on occasion got him in considerable trouble. He was the son of Edward Campion Acheson, an Episcopalian minister who had soldiered early in his career, migrated to Canada, and fought the Indians in Manitoba, before turning to the ministry and coming to the United States. As such the righteousness of the cause, and the willingness to bear arms in its name, were properly blended in Acheson’s home. While in Canada, Edward Acheson had married Eleanor Gooderham, the daughter of a successful whiskey distiller and bank president, and in time he found his way to Middletown, Connecticut, as the local minister, eventually becoming the bishop of Connecticut. Dean Gooderham Acheson was born in 1893 into a very traditional, quite conservative home of tried and true Anglophiles. The family was moderately successful, exceptionally well connected, but in no way wealthy. In time, young Dean went off to Groton, then Yale, where he was the most casual of students, and in time Harvard Law School, where for the first time he applied himself intellectually. He became a protégé of the great law professor and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and was, for a time, private secretary to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. It was Frankfurter, a kind of one-man clearinghouse and skilled networker for New Deal talent, who helped connect Acheson, by then a successful Washington corporate lawyer, to Roosevelt, who appointed him undersecretary of the treasury in 1933. The Frankfurter connection helped, but so did the Groton one, for Roosevelt had gone there as well.

Acheson was superior in education, dress, and attitude if not wealth, and he was unafraid to show it: his manner, self-evidently one of superiority, both intellectual and social, often grated on those he considered lesser mortals. He was not afflicted by self-doubt. Rather, he was the kind of man who believed that doing the right kind of deals with the right people for the right purpose
was just fine, indeed noble, and surely above politics, but that comparable deals made by his opposition reflected a lack of honor and character, done as they were in his eyes by men of questionable motives. He had a simply dreadful touch with altogether too many members of Congress, as if the political process itself had tainted them. He tended to talk down to them, much like a schoolteacher who has given one lecture too many to unruly sixth-graders. He treated us, said Walter Judd, a Republican congressman from Minnesota, a former missionary in China, and one of the key figures in the China Lobby, with “a certain condescension, like he was sorry for us hayseeds, that he was casting pearls before swine.” To his critics, with his snobbish manner, bespoke British tailoring, and Guards’ mustache, he was the very embodiment of everything they resented about Washington, the government, and the New Deal. “I watch his smart-aleck manner, and his British clothes, and that New Dealism…and I want to shout, ‘Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong for America for years,’” said Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska. The mustache seemed to be something of a sticking point. Acheson’s old friend Averell Harriman had told him to shave it off because it stirred up such resentment—“You owe it to Truman,” he had said.

Acheson was more than anything else a man of the Atlantic. He had been an early and passionate interventionist at the time of World War II, and he had been for Roosevelt in 1940 when many of his contemporaries felt a third term was essentially undemocratic. Probably no high figure in the government made the transition from Roosevelt to Truman more readily than Acheson; he had become undersecretary of state in 1945, and almost immediately a great favorite of the new president. Acheson sensed from the start, as few others did, Truman’s strength, character, determination, and if need be, fearlessness. What Truman essentially wanted in Europe—the kind of stability that the victors had failed to provide after World War I—was exactly what Acheson wanted. It helped, of course, that Truman, so untested in foreign policy, needed Acheson in a way Roosevelt never had; in turn Acheson liked how straightforward Truman was, a relief to him after what he considered Roosevelt’s constantly manipulative presence. Acheson had once told John Carter Vincent, one of his top China people at the State Department, “John Carter, that little fellow across the street has more to him than you think.” That there might have been more than a little condescension in such a statement, for he was saying in effect that such a
little fellow
might nonetheless be worthy of working with them, did not, of course, strike him. But the surprising personal ease of Truman and Acheson was in many ways admirable, a model for that of a president and secretary of state. “I have a constituency of one,” Acheson once said.

If it was the Age of Acheson, then the age reflected his weaknesses as well as
his strengths. Thus on the things he understood best—the need to stabilize the European democracies and to create an economically strong world in Europe to withstand potential Soviet expansionism—the United States was eminently successful. On the parts of the world he cared less about and did not know as well—and on the question of what an anticolonial era would mean to the West—American foreign policy would be much less successful. He was a truly conservative man, conservative in the old-fashioned sense of the word. He was also a man who cared very little about the profound challenge to the old order just beginning to take place in the underdeveloped world, a challenge that in different form, and ever growing force, would bedevil his lineal descendants for much of the ensuring thirty years.

One of Acheson’s problems dealing with the underdeveloped world was that it did not yet produce men who were easy for him to deal with, men just like himself, the way the British and to a lesser degree the French and now the Germans did. There were no Anthony Edens or Jean Monnets, or Konrad Adenauers; in no way could he possibly have seen Ho Chi Minh as their equal. In 1952, for example, as the French effort in Indochina was beginning to fail because of the military and political skill of the Vietminh, Acheson remained curiously obtuse. The French were desperate by then, and they had tried to prop up as a legitimate indigenous leader a frivolous, aristocratic playboy named Bao Dai. Regrettably for the French cause, he was far more given to enjoying the pleasures of the south of France than walking among his own people in the rice paddies of his own country, and the Vietnamese, engaged in a revolutionary war at the time, had, predictably, little interest in being led by him. At that point, as David McLellan, one of Acheson’s biographers, noted, the secretary of state decided that the fault lay with the Vietnamese people themselves. “They seem to have a typically Eastern fatalistic lack of interest in public support,” he commented. “So far as we can see, France has already given them more autonomy than they have seen fit to use.” Yet what drove the Vietminh was the absolute reverse—nothing less than a passion to rid their country of a colonial power—and the French commanders in the field never spoke of the passive fatalism of their opponents; rather, the word they used was fanaticism.