The political repercussions of the Chinese intervention were at least as great as the military ones. The autumn had been a period of fluctuating fortune for Truman, as for MacArthur. They had met once, for a few hours on Wake Island on October 15th. Typically, Truman travelled 4,700 miles and MacArthur only 1,900. He persuaded the President, who was not particularly eager to have him in Washington, that he could not separate himself from his troops for a longer journey. The President found him at a peak of benignant condescension and complacency. ‘We arrived at dawn’, he wrote for his diary. ‘General MacArthur was at the Airport with his shirt unbuttoned, wearing a greasy ham and eggs cap that evidently had been in use for twenty years. He greeted the President cordially …’ He also assured the President that ‘the Chinese Commies would not attack, that we had won the war and that we could send a Division to Europe in January 1951’.13 Truman in return gave MacArthur a fourth cluster to his Distinguished Service Medal, bestowed with a presidential citation which expressed not merely confidence but adulation. So there was a good exchange of misinformation.
The mid-term elections were on November 7th. Truman did little campaigning but accidentally made what might have been expected to be a substantial contribution to a good result. On November 1st he escaped a serious assassination attempt outside Blair House. It was mounted by two young Puerto Rican nationalists. One was shot dead, as was a Blair House guard, with two others wounded. The other would-be assassin was imprisoned until 1979. It was at 2.20 in the afternoon. Despite the month the temperature was 84°F, and Truman perhaps for this reason, but clearly contrary to the perception of his habits, was asleep on his bed at the time. He rather dangerously rushed to his bedroom window, but otherwise took the attack calmly.
It may be that the incident averted worse misfortunes at the polls but there was no direct evidence of its favourable effects. The poison of McCarthy was well into the national blood stream by then, and the results were worse where the Senator had pursued personal vendettas than overall—a sign to all except the most courageous that he was a dangerous man to oppose. As a result it was more the quality than the quantity of the losses from which the Democrats suffered. They retained control of both chambers, although 28 seats changed hands in the House and five in the Senate, reducing the margin there to two. Scott Lucas, the majority leader, was defeated in Illinois, as was Myers, the majority whip, in Pennsylvania. Millard Tydings, into whom McCarthy had plunged his knife most deeply, went down in Maryland, and Richard Nixon, to the particular chagrin of Truman, beat Helen Gahagan Douglas in California.
This was not a glorious outcome for Truman’s last electoral battle, but nor was it a disaster on the scale of 1946. More seriously on his mind during that November was the deteriorating situation in Korea. This was a paradox, for the month was mostly one of rapid, even reckless advance. But it was one in which the Pentagon and the State Department lost almost all remnants of confidence in MacArthur. They were pretty sure that Chinese intervention was coming, and thought that his approach to this alternated between provocation and panic. They distrusted his strategy of advancing far and fast with increasingly splayed out forces and a divided command. And they knew that his continuous public complaints about not being allowed to attack the Chinese were not only gross insubordination but also gravely damaging to the unity of the United Nations allies.
Acheson conveyed the atmosphere well, and also gave vent to a rare burst of self-criticism, when he wrote:
‘All the President’s advisers in this matter, civilian and military, knew that something was badly wrong, though what it was, how to find out, and what to do about it they muffed. That they were deeply disturbed and felt the need for common counsel is shown by the unprecedented fact that in the three weeks and three days from November 10th to December 4th, when disaster was full upon us, the Secretaries of State and Defense and their chief assistants met three times with the Chiefs of Staff in their war room to tussle with the problem, the two Secretaries met five times with the President, and I consulted with him on five other occasions. I have an unhappy conviction that none of us, myself prominently included, served him as he was entitled to be served.’14
This may somewhat exaggerate the extent to which the advisers were baffled rather than intimidated. They knew well enough that the main thing that was wrong was MacArthur, but were inhibited from recommending his removal by a combination of fear of the political explosion which would follow and a natural caution about changing horses in mid-stream. General Ridgway, who was not a full member of the group and might also have been expected—as a likely successor—to be the most inhibited, was the only one who blurted out his impatience that they would not face up to and deal with the MacArthur problem. But he did not do so until December 3rd, when most of the damage was done.