To be sure, some American national security officials believed that a Korean Peninsula under Communist control would represent a threat to Japanese security and wished to discourage Communist convictions that America would passively accept the North’s absorption of the South. But with so many demands on U.S. resources in Europe and Japan, Korea did not stand out as a likely field of combat for U.S. forces, especially after refusing to fight Mao’s armies in China. To the White House, the ideal compromise was the mutual withdrawal of American and Soviet troops from the peninsula, simultaneous with UN-supervised elections that could unite North and South Korea under a representative government.
Although both Moscow and Washington agreed to withdraw their troops, the Soviets would not support peninsula-wide elections that seemed certain to give the more populous pro-American South, where two-thirds of Koreans lived, control of its client in the North. Washington’s alternative was an independent South Korea supported by U.S. aid that would remain a buffer for Japan against the North Korean and Chinese Communists. In addition, the emergence of a pro-Western South Korea could help quiet complaints in the United States that the White House was too passive in dealing with Communist aggression and needed to reverse the pattern of recent Soviet advances and U.S. retreats.
Despite the decision to support an independent Seoul, by 1950 Korea was largely lost in the daily catalogue of East-West tensions. When Dean Acheson spoke at the National Press Club in Washington on January 12 about U.S. national security concerns in Asia, Korea was notable for its absence. In line with the Joint Chiefs and MacArthur in Tokyo, Acheson omitted South Korea from his description of a “defensive perimeter” running from the Aleutian Islands through Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. Congress matched White House reluctance to make South Korea a priority in the emerging Asian cold war by voting only limited financial support.
The principal object of Acheson’s speech was to discourage continuing talk of U.S. intervention on the mainland to oust Mao’s government, calling it “the folly of ill-conceived adventures on our part” and predicting that any such action would “deflect from the Russians to ourselves the righteous anger, and the wrath, and the hatred of the Chinese which must develop. It would be folly to deflect it to ourselves.”
The possibility of an assault on South Korea by Pyongyang wasn’t entirely missing from discussions about the Communist threat. At the close of Acheson’s speech, a reporter asked how it would be possible to defend the South against an attack by the North. In response, Acheson referred the journalist to the Pentagon’s assumption that Seoul could hold its own against the Communists and that the United Nations, which had taken responsibility for South Korea’s elections, would meet its commitment to repel aggression, as its Charter had intended. Nothing was said about Moscow’s veto power in the Security Council, where a vote would need to precede any UN military action.
That neither Acheson nor anyone else made this a part of the calculations about Korea is understandable. The disinclination even to think about a U.S. military role in a conflict on the peninsula was matched by an equal reluctance to involve ourselves in the political war of words between North and South or the intrapolitical clashes swirling around Rhee’s coalition government. Given the multiple political worries facing the Truman administration—building the European alliance, combating the domestic outcry over the “loss” of China, determining how to meet pressures from Chiang and the China lobby should Mao’s forces move against Taiwan—Korea was a side show that commanded minimal attention.
Perceptions in North Korea, Moscow, and Peking about conditions in the South and American detachment from developments on the peninsula encouraged the Communists to think that if Kim Il Sung’s forces crossed the parallel, it would not provoke a U.S. military response and might well generate an outpouring of support from dissidents being suppressed by Rhee.
By June 1950, anyone focusing closely on events of the previous two years—or, for that matter, since 1945—should not have been surprised that a civil war was in the offing. The governments in both the North and the South were notable for their militant rhetoric about unifying all Korea under their respective regimes.
In the North, Kim Il Sung was a thirty-six-year-old firebrand. In 1929, as a seventeen-year-old student in Manchuria, where he and his family had moved to escape the oppressive Japanese occupation of Korea, he had joined the Communist Party. Between 1930 and 1945, he moved back and forth between China and Russia and gained distinction among Communists in both countries as a commander of Korean troops fighting the Japanese. His devotion to independence for Korea from Tokyo’s control and to revolutionary Marxist doctrines made him an attractive candidate for head of a provisional government in Pyongyang, where he reflected Moscow’s determination to impose a Communist government on all of Korea.
In 1948, after the Soviets rejected calls for UN-supervised elections as a prelude to Korean unification, Moscow rewarded Kim’s loyalty by making him North Korea’s prime minister. It was the culmination of a personal campaign to make himself the ultimate ruler of all Korea, if possible, and at a minimum, the all-powerful leader of a North Korean state.
He succeeded beyond anything Stalin and Mao—two of the most storied autocrats of the twentieth century—achieved as authoritarian heads of their parties and countries. Kim elevated himself to a figure of transcendent importance in North Korea. Over forty-six years he created a cult of personality that seems comparable only to a religious movement whose devoted worshipers give unquestioned loyalty to their leader. Monuments to the “Eternal President,” as the country’s constitution described Kim, made him a constant presence in every city and hamlet. A sixty-six-foot bronze statue occupies a prominent place in Pyongyang, to which his adoring countrymen could come to worship their Great Leader.
Like other authoritarian figures of his generation—Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—Kim was a man of contradictions. Despite the murderous impulses that Hitler visited on his millions of victims, he could show kindness to children and displayed great affection for his dogs. According to Averell Harriman, one of the westerners who saw Stalin up close most often and knew him best, he was a difficult character to pigeonhole: “It is hard for me to reconcile the courtesy and consideration that he showed me personally with the ghastly cruelty of his wholesale liquidations. Others, who did not know him personally, see only the tyrant in Stalin. I saw the other side as well—his high intelligence, that fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and his surprising human sensitivity.”
Kim could also show people a kindly side. One South Korean who repeatedly visited Pyongyang as Kim’s guest had no illusions about his ruthless treatment of his countrymen. “There was no such thing as a conversation with Kim Il Sung,” he said. “If he spoke to a North Korean, that person stood up, in effect at attention, to receive instructions or orders.” By contrast, Kim showed his guest special regard, calling him every day to ask about his well-being and personal comfort. New York congressman Stephen J. Solarz, the first elected American official to meet with Kim in 1980, described him as avuncular, a burly, heavyset man eager to convince a U.S. official that he was no ogre but an approachable statesman principally concerned with the happiness and welfare of his people.
From the moment the Soviets installed him as North Korea’s prime minister in 1948, Kim built a military force that would allow him to defend against a possible invasion from the South and prepare for a move across the thirty-eighth parallel to bring all of Korea under his control. Kim’s concern that South Korean forces might attack his country before he attacked them was not simply the speculations of a paranoid mind. From the start of his election as South Korea’s president in 1948, Syngman Rhee openly favored a “march north” to rid the peninsula of Communist influence and achieve a lifelong dream of governing a single Korean nation.
Like Kim, Rhee had spent most of his life before 1945 in exile. Born in 1875, Rhee was already seventy when he returned to his homeland. Given his age, he had a
sense of urgency about unifying Korea. He also felt that the hardships he had endured as a nationalist forced to live abroad entitled him to become the first president of a modern Korean state. As a young man, between 1897 and 1904, he had spent seven years in prison for opposing Japanese control of his country. Upon his release, he went to the United States, where he studied at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Harvard, and Princeton, earning a PhD in international law at the latter institution. Rhee returned to Korea for three years between 1910 and 1913, before his renewed political opposition to Japanese control of his homeland forced him to flee again to the United States, where he settled in Hawaii as the principal of a Korean school.
In 1919 Rhee was elected president of a provisional Korean government formed by pro-independence factions based in Shanghai. Unable to assert himself effectively against the divisive groups that made up the coalition, however, he was ousted from the presidency in 1925 amid charges of abuse of power by opponents who saw him as too dictatorial—a prelude to what occurred when he became South Korea’s first president in 1948. The same divisive factionalism would plague the South after 1945, when 205 groups asked for recognition as political parties. As one member of the U.S. occupying force would jest, “Every time two Koreans sit down to eat they form a new political party.”
A Rhee campaign to remove all leftists from political influence in Seoul, as well as his unconstitutional actions, including arbitrary arrests, detentions, and torture of opponents, provoked divisions and tension across South Korea, spawning an armed rebellion and encouraging Kim to believe that should his armies cross the parallel, they would be welcomed as a genuine unifying force.
It was the Truman administration’s misfortune to have two such autocratic and self-righteous figures vying for power in Korea. Each man’s interest in unifying the country under his exclusive control exceeded any genuine regard for the well-being of the Korean people. If Kim and Rhee had to shed blood and repress dissent by any and all means, they considered this a small price to pay for fulfilling their grandiose dreams of becoming the founder of a modern Korean nation. With such leaders, the Korean people didn’t need foreign occupiers who treated them badly.
The clash of wills between Kim and Rhee was a prelude of sorts for what the United States would have to deal with later in negotiations to end the war between South and North Vietnam. As Kissinger privately told a reporter in 1972 about the representatives of the two countries, “when you meet with two groups of Vietnamese in the same day, you might as well run an insane asylum.” He called them “tawdry, filthy shits” who “make the Russians look good.” Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of South Vietnam, was “an insane son-of-a-bitch,” and the North Vietnamese were a bunch of “bastards” who “have been screwing us.”
The Koreans and the Vietnamese shared an aversion to representative government; kings and despots were the traditional rulers of the peasant farmers who peopled their countries. Democracy was an exotic import the Americans, speaking from their own experience, hoped both Asian cultures would see fit to embrace. The solution to political problems this latest foreign occupier of Korea asked them to accept was reasoned discussion of their differences. But in 1950 neither Kim nor Rhee saw any solution to their opposing national visions except force of arms. Although their disagreements would precipitate a war, they shared an affinity for repression and control that made them more alike than either would have cared to admit.
The outbreak of the Korean conflict on June 25, 1950, was the result of an extraordinary combination of events in at least five countries: North and South Korea, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. Each played a significant part in moving the divided Koreans toward bloodshed.
In the South, in 1949, Rhee’s government had initiated a series of attacks on North Korean forces stationed along the thirty-eighth parallel. Because his forces were insufficient in numbers and equipment to stage an effective advance north, Rhee provoked the fighting as a way to command Washington’s attention and stimulate military and financial aid the Americans were reluctant to provide. The clashes with the Communists also gave Rhee an excuse to crack down on political opponents on the left and stimulate greater unity of support for his government, which was threatened by destabilizing factionalism.
Conditions in the South had encouraged Kim to believe that Rhee’s republic was too divided to resist an invasion and absorption into his Communist regime. Because Rhee was making progress in suppressing insurgents, who might overturn his government in response to an invasion, and was developing a relationship with Japan that could strengthen South Korea’s economy, Kim was eager to strike as quickly as possible.
In 1949 Kim pressed Stalin for permission to invade the South. But the Soviet dictator equivocated, urging Kim instead to support armed insurgents who might topple Rhee’s government without an invasion. At the beginning of 1950, however, with the acquisition of the A-bomb, Mao’s victory in China, the emerging alliance with Peking, and the conviction that Washington would shortly reach a peace agreement with Tokyo that would station U.S. forces in Japan indefinitely and threaten Moscow’s Far East possessions, Stalin’s opposition had softened. An East-West stalemate in Europe had shifted his focus to Asia, where opportunities for Communist gains seemed greater. Specifically, believing that the United States would stand aside, as it had in China, and as Acheson’s description of a northeast Asian defense perimeter seemed to confirm, Stalin viewed South Korea as vulnerable to an attack from the North. He also saw potential benefits from a U.S. intervention in a Korean civil war: it might slow a military buildup in Europe and limit the West’s capacity to threaten the Soviet Union’s dominance in Eastern Europe.
Yet Stalin had qualified his approval of an attack by instructing Kim to seek Mao’s support before he acted. The Chinese might oppose a war on the peninsula out of concern that it could lead to U.S. intervention, North Korean defeat, and jeopardy to Mao’s control of the mainland—developments that would reverse Moscow’s recent advances in Asia.
But the Chinese did not resist Kim’s war plans. Like Kim and Stalin, Mao doubted that the Americans would fight to prevent North Korea’s unification of the peninsula. When chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tom Connally, a Democrat allied with Truman, publicly acknowledged in May 1950 that the United States would probably be unable to prevent a Communist takeover in Seoul, Acheson, reiterating the administration’s Korean policy, rejected suggestions that the United States would intervene to prevent such an outcome, reinforcing Communist convictions that South Korea would be abandoned by its sponsor.
Although the Chinese were reluctant to see a war erupt in Korea before they had ousted Chiang from Taiwan, they could not deny Kim’s request for moral and material backing and a commitment to join the conflict should U.S. forces threaten Pyongyang with defeat. Saying no would have made the Chinese seem less committed to the fight against international capitalism and less militant in revolutionary zeal than the USSR, with which they already had a keen, if muted, rivalry. Moreover, a sense of obligation to North Korea’s Communists, who had fought in Mao’s armies against Chiang, made it difficult for Peking to discourage Kim from fighting his own civil war.
In the final analysis, the war was the result of poor leadership and misjudgments by the heads of government in Pyongyang, Moscow, Peking, Seoul, and Washington, none of whose calculations proved prescient. If Stalin, Mao, and Kim had had a better understanding of the political pressures on the Truman administration, they would have assessed the likelihood of U.S. intervention in the fighting more realistically. If Rhee and U.S. military planners had recognized just how weak Rhee’s armed forces were, and if Truman and Acheson had anticipated the irresistible pressure to intervene in the fighting, they would have promised support for Seoul against any attack and warned North Korea not to test America’s resolve.
American interest in preventing small or large wars should have made Washington more active in dissuading the
Koreans, North and South, from an all-out military conflict. This was essential because the two Koreas, China, and the Soviet Union were never as put off by the prospect of a civil war as Washington.
The autocrats in those countries operated with a casualness about potential war costs that set them apart from the Truman administration and Americans as a whole. Kim, Rhee, and Mao rationalized their actions as serving their countrymen, and when these actions resulted in painful losses, they lauded the sacrifice, as essential to the national well-being. Stalin could feel less troubled about a Korean outbreak than Peking, Pyongyang, or Seoul, since Soviet troops were not fighting, and the deaths of Koreans, Chinese, and Americans did not trouble his sleep. Having shed so much Soviet blood by mistakenly aligning himself with Hitler in 1939, and by purging ethnic and political opponents of his rule, he was indifferent to the death of others in what he saw as the service of his country and personal power. As the North Koreans began to pay a heavy price for the war, Stalin said that they “lose nothing, except for their men.”
The news of Kim’s invasion of the South shocked the White House—less because a civil war on the peninsula had seemed so unlikely than because a South Korea forcefully brought under Communist control would undermine America’s international position and public confidence at home.
In the four days after the North Korean attack began in the early morning of June 25, Rhee’s armies suffered a series of defeats. In less than forty-eight hours, Kim’s forces were moving on Seoul, and General MacArthur, America’s principal military chief in the Far East, began predicting South Korea’s collapse. Despite support by U.S. air and naval units of the hard-pressed Republic of Korea (ROK) armies, North Korean troops seemed poised to overrun the peninsula. In response, on June 30, President Truman ordered U.S. ground forces in Japan to enter the fighting and the U.S. Seventh Fleet to take up positions in the Taiwan Strait, where it would stand guard against any Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan. South Korea’s possible fall compelled a dramatic shift in thinking about saving Chiang’s Nationalists. The outbreak of the fighting had unanticipated and unwelcome consequences for every nation the war touched—except for Chiang Kai-shek, for whom it meant a last-minute reprieve from a final defeat by the Communists.