The first two questions were substantially and disagreeably cleared up by lunchtime on the Sunday, when Truman received his second telephone call from Acheson. There was no doubt about the seriousness of the invasion. It was no frontier raid, comparable with those which had quite frequently occurred in the previous months, but a determined military attempt to re-unite the peninsula under Communist control. Nor was the South Korean performance giving any basis for confidence. Syngman Rhee, their seventy-five-year-old president, who had returned from nearly forty years’ exile in the United States, was a master of fulmination, almost as much against the pusillanimity of the West as against the aggression of the Communists. But at this stage at least he could not make his army fight. Within the first twenty-four hours, Seoul, the capital, together with the main airport of the country and the second maritime port were all imminently threatened. What was immediately proposed by Acheson was the calling of an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council in the hope that it would not only denounce the aggression but pass a resolution of action. If it did so the main burden of implementation would clearly fall on the United States. If it did not the responsibility on the leading nation for trying to deal with the resultant diplomatic chaos and the exposed military impotence of the UN would be greater still. Truman therefore decided to return immediately and to summon a dinner meeting of his principal advisers, civilian and military, at Blair House for that evening.
Having decided on the return he set off in such a hurry that half his staff, the whole of the accompanying White House press corps and (almost) the navigator3 were left behind. When confronted with a crisis he was seized with an almost excessive appetite for rapid decision-making. If Goering, when he heard the word culture, reached for his gun, Truman, when he heard the word problem, reached for a decision. The danger was that he would take one before he had heard the relevant evidence; the miracle was that he made so many wise ones. He was therefore impatient to get back. But there was no joyful anticipation. He was not bellicose. The last thing that Truman wanted at this stage was a war in Korea. There was no question of his being like Churchill (before he became older, more battle-scarred, and above all oppressed by the almost infinitely destructive power of nuclear weapons), who, at midnight on August 4th, 1914 was recorded by Margot Asquith as ‘with a happy face striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet room.’3
Truman flew over Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia towards his Blair House rendezvous in a mood of alert determination, but not with a happy face or heart. The war solved one problem for him, that of NSC 68. Within twelve months the United States had a defence budget of over $50 billion a year, and by no means all of the increase went to Korea. But from every other point of view the consequences were heavy. A deep shadow of death and divisiveness was cast upon the last two and a half years of his presidency. The climate of frustration in which the United States, with its still overwhelming nuclear superiority, had to fight desperate and costly conventional battles, in order to limit the dangers of escalation and calm the nerves of its European allies, gave McCarthy-ism a second and stronger wind. It was also a peculiar misfortune that if there had to be a long but limited war in a distant theatre it should be within the area of responsibility of Truman’s most famous and insubordinate commander. General Douglas MacArthur did not allow the remarkable fact that he had not set foot in the United States for thirteen years to prevent his being one of the most ‘political’ generals ever to hold high command; and neither his politics nor (mostly) his policies were those of Truman.
Truman of course could not foresee all this on June 25th. If told that the war could be limited to the Korean peninsula, he would probably have been amazed to be equally informed that United States casualties would approach a half of those in World War I. Yet his thoughts, during the previous 18 hours and in the plane, were sombre. He believed, according to the clear testimony of his daughter who was present at Independence, that the Korean invasion was probably the ‘opening round’ in World War III.4 This was in fact, as he was well advised by his Chiefs of Staff that night in Washington, rather heavily against any balance of rational probability. The Soviet union was in a substantially weaker position vis-à-vis the United States than it was likely to be in a few years’ time. It could not possibly have sustained a successful all-out war. It would therefore have been extremely foolish to launch one.
On the other hand there was no doubt in the minds of Truman’s advisers, any more than in his own, that the invasion was Moscow-planned, and that forces far greater than Kim’s own, successful though they were so far proving, had to be taken into account. In fact, if Krushchev’s memoirs are to be believed,5 this somewhat exaggerated the degree of central control. The initiative for the attack came from Kim Il-sung. Stalin acquiesced, but only after consulting Mao Tse-tung, and fairly soon began to wish that he had not done so. The strong reaction of the United States, and indeed of the United Nations, was not foreseen.4 Khrushchev’s account clearly brings out the vast difference compared with today in the Far Eastern strategic balance because of the then apparently impregnable alliance between the Soviet union and the People’s Republic of China. Behind North Korea stood China, and behind China stood Russia.