Insisting that the prisoner exchange should be an unrestricted swap of all POWs, the Chinese saw the U.S. proposal as creating “a serious political struggle.” But with the Chinese consumer economy continuing to suffer severe strains from demands for war production and a weather-induced famine in north China threatening the stability of Mao’s regime, he became eager to refocus national energies on internal growth rather than defense needs. Yet he would not end the conflict under what he described as “bullying … by foreign imperialists.”
While eager to gain a propaganda victory over Peking as well as avert the sort of tragedy that had occurred at the end of World War II when some Soviet POWs had committed suicide rather than return home, the United States searched for a formula that would allow the Chinese to accept voluntary repatriation. To soften the blow to Peking from a mass refusal of their internees to go home, the United States promised to return at least 70,000 POWs. In July 1952, three months after this initial proposal, Washington increased the number to 83,000.
But when Washington described the POW exchange as a human rights issue, the dispute became too great a potential embarrassment to Peking for it to agree to a compromise. The Chinese denounced the U.S. plan as “absolutely” unacceptable, calling it “a brutal and shameless proposition.”
Despite the Chinese response, Truman refused to budge on freedom of choice for POWs. In December and January, 1951–52, when the issue threatened to stalemate the talks, the president told State and Defense department advisers that more was at stake than just the freedom of some Chinese and North Korean POWs: he feared that an armistice in Korea would prove to be only a temporary pause in the fighting that could eventually topple South Korea and spur isolationist sentiment in the United States. Moreover, he worried that an end to the war would undermine support for the country’s rearmament program under NSC-68.
Nevertheless, Truman was painfully ambivalent about continuing the war. He couldn’t let go of the conviction that anything short of a perceived victory over the Communists would be destructive to America’s long-term prospects in the Cold War. At the same time, however, it was costing the country precious lives and tax dollars that could go to domestic programs—health insurance for seniors and federal aid to education—that he had promised to enact under his Fair Deal. In addition, the war was undermining his popularity and playing havoc with his freedom to lead the country in both domestic and foreign affairs.
At the end of January 1952, Truman’s frustration at being trapped in a war that he had no clear way to end and that was destroying his presidency found expression in a private diary entry that would not see the light of day until decades later. “Dealing with communist governments is like an honest man trying to deal with a numbers racket king or the head of a dope ring,” he complained. The Communists were entirely without a “moral code.” Their criminality allowed him to imagine sending “an ultimatum with a ten day expiration limit, informing Moscow that we intend to blockade the China coast from the Korean border to Indo-China.” He wished to threaten to “destroy every military base in Manchuria, … and if there is any interference we shall eliminate any ports or cities necessary to accomplish our peaceful purposes…. We are tired of these phony calls for peace when there is no intention to make an honest approach to peace…. This means all-out war.” After ticking off Russia’s and China’s principal cities that “will be eliminated,” he concluded, “This is the final chance for the Soviet Government to decide whether it desires to survive or not.”
Truman’s apocalyptic fantasy rested on a conviction that it was the Soviets who were calling the shots in the Korean fighting by using the Chinese and North Koreans to do their bidding without direct sacrifice by their own citizens. And as in every war, where adversaries dehumanize each other in order to justify mass killing, Truman pictured the Communists as ruthless enough to continue fighting even if it meant annihilation for their governments and societies. Killing great numbers of Russians and Chinese could be rationalized as not the fault of Americans dropping atomic bombs on their cities but the consequence of the policies imposed on their countries by madmen.
At the same time that Truman ventilated his rage at Moscow and Peking for forcing him and the United States into a debilitating and demoralizing conflict, he could not bring himself to issue such an ultimatum out of fear that he might have to act upon it. It would then burden him and the United States with the guilt of having slaughtered millions of innocent people, exceeding the mass destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson’s initial response to World War I, that America was too proud to fight, Truman saw himself as too civilized to act as the Nazis had and the Communists might if they were in America’s advantaged position. Besides, if he unleashed nuclear attacks on Russia and China, it would be no more or less than what he had dismissed MacArthur for suggesting—an all-out war to end the Communist threat.
The tensions at the negotiating table increased in the first half of 1952. Partly to counter the propaganda advantage the United States gained from its support for voluntary repatriation, the Chinese began hammering on charges of biological warfare by the Americans against North Korean and Chinese troops and civilians in Manchuria. Although none of these assertions has ever been proved, archival evidence indicates that the Chinese genuinely believed that American pilots were dropping bombs containing infected insects on noncombatants, and they did all in their power to disseminate the information to domestic and international audiences.
These charges, coupled with China’s unbending stance on POWs, incensed U.S. officials. General Ridgway denounced the Chinese as “treacherous savages” with no regard for human life or “sense of honor.” Peking’s claims suggested that the Americans, who had used atomic bombs against the Japanese, were racists ready to exterminate other Asians with biological weapons.
The POW issue, on which a majority of Americans supported the administration, nevertheless put Truman in a difficult position. The continuing incarceration of U.S. prisoners for the sake of their Chinese and North Korean counterparts, who had fought against the United States, but whose freedom was the sticking point in the negotiations, was not likely to sit well indefinitely with most Americans. Truman also resented having to defend the United States from what he saw as unsubstantiated complaints about germ warfare, which found receptive audiences in many “neutral” Third World countries. The accusations gave Peking a political counter to attacks on it as afraid to let its POWs choose between going home and taking refuge in the “free world.”
Truman continued to blame the war and its physical losses and political dilemmas on the Russians. In another private outburst in May 1952, he recorded in a diary that he would like to tell Stalin and his Politburo: “You have broken every agreement you made at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. You have no morals, no honor…. Now do you want an end to hostilities in Korea or do you want China and Siberia destroyed? You may have one or the other, whichever you want…. You either accept our fair and just proposal or you will be completely destroyed.” He signed the diary entry: “C. in C,” Commander in Chief, rationalizing such drastic action as a military imperative. But again, it was a step too far: an act of mass destruction that other countries would see as unjustified and would open the United States to accusations of ruthlessness exceeding anything the Communists did. Besides, it remained too much like MacArthur’s solution to the conflict for Truman to have followed through on such extreme measures.
Nevertheless, he was determined to take a hard line with the Chinese short of using nuclear weapons. He would not compromise on the principle of voluntary prisoner returns. And since the Communists were also unwilling to bend on the issue, Truman believed that the best course to an armistice was through renewed attacks on their troops in Korea with beefed-up and better-equipped U.S. forces. With the November 1952 elections on the horizon, he was not going to undermine Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, or his party’s hold on the Congress by sho
wing any weakness in his dealings with Peking and Pyongyang. On October 8, after three months of sporadic talks when the Chinese had rejected the latest U.S. proposal for prisoner exchanges, the U.S. delegation announced an indefinite recess in the negotiations.
The hope that a renewed offensive against Chinese forces could bring Peking back to the negotiating table quickly lost credibility. The Chinese had dug in so effectively along the existing combat lines, increasing their armies to 1.35 million men, stockpiling ample amounts of food and ammunition, and developing North Korean coastal defenses against an Inchon sort of landing, that prospects of routing them faded fast. To be sure, a stepped-up air war leveled cities and towns in North Korea. And according to the U.S. Air Force, it took control of a hundred-mile area behind enemy lines by day-and- night saturation bombing. Although air force planners believed that this sort of attack could prove decisive in the war, the prompt rebuilding of roads, bridges, and rail lines demonstrated otherwise.
By the fall of 1952 the war had turned into a stalemate, and the belligerents could only look forward to more loss of life in the maneuvering for advantage on the ground and the destruction of North Korea’s infrastructure from the air, especially its irrigation dams and its rice crops, the country’s principal food staple. The Chinese now hoped to outlast the Americans, whose patience with a war of attrition seemed distinctly limited. In a conversation Chou En-lai had with Stalin in August 1952, Chou confidently described the conflict as “getting on America’s nerves” and a clear demonstration that “the USA is not ready for the world war.”
Stalin encouraged Chou to see the United States as a paper tiger, saying, “The Americans are not capable of waging a large-scale war at all…. All of their strength lies in air power and the atom bomb…. America cannot defeat little Korea…. Americans are merchants. Every American soldier is a speculator, occupied with buying and selling…. It’s been already two years and USA has still not subdued little Korea. What kind of strength is that? … They are pinning their hopes on the atom bomb and air power. But one cannot win a war with that. One needs infantry, and they don’t have much infantry; the infantry they do have is weak. They are fighting with little Korea, and already people are weeping in the USA.”
For all the brave talk about American weakness, Stalin counseled caution, advising against Chinese air raids on South Korea or any sort of offensive while armistice negotiations were continuing. Chou agreed about holding off on an offensive while truce talks went forward, but said that “China is preparing for the possibility of another 2–3 years of war.”
The Truman administration also believed that the war might continue for quite a while. But it was determined not to show any signs of weakness by giving in on the POW issue, despite mounting convictions that the conflict was becoming a repeat of the deadlocked trench warfare of World War I.
The Republican presidential campaign by Dwight Eisenhower and vice presidential nominee Richard Nixon made it especially difficult for Truman to yield anything in the negotiations. It would confirm the Republican assault on the president and his party as naive and unreliable in the contest with communism for national survival.
Nixon, who had established a reputation as a fierce anti-Communist through his pursuit of Alger Hiss, was the campaign’s point man for attacking the Democrats as having failed to defend the country from the Communist menace at home and abroad. New Deal appointees were depicted as subversives, especially in the State Department, where they had allegedly allowed Mao’s Communists to seize control of China. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee, was described as a brainy Ivy League type who lacked the military training and hardheaded realism held by “Ike” to deal with the fundamental dangers posed by the plotters in the Kremlin and Peking reaching for world control.
Nixon summed up the campaign’s assault on Stevenson and the Democrats when he said that the Illinois governor was a graduate of (in some versions, held a PhD from) Dean Acheson’s “Cowardly College of Communist Containment.” The phrase effectively announced the campaign’s principal message: Stevenson and the Democrats are elite intellectuals who are either covert Communist sympathizers or too soft-minded to do more than contain rather than defeat the Communists.
Although Eisenhower came to the campaign as an apolitical military hero, who had never voted and had no party affiliation (at the beginning of 1952, some Democrats, including Truman, hoped Ike might run on their ticket), the general proved to be a savvy politician.
Less acerbic than Nixon or other right-wing Republicans like McCarthy, Jenner, and Robert Taft of Ohio, Eisenhower nevertheless exploited the national mood about the Democrats’ failure to meet the Communist challenge, especially in Korea. When he campaigned in Indiana, Jenner’s home state, Eisenhower did not resist having Jenner on the platform with him, where the senator would grab Ike’s arm and thrust it skyward in a show of unity at each applause line. Jenner’s attack on George Marshall, Ike’s mentor, as a “front man for traitors” and “a living lie” did not deter Eisenhower from standing shoulder to shoulder with Jenner. In private, Eisenhower complained that Jenner’s touch made him feel dirty, but he gave no sign in public of being at odds with him.
The general further compromised himself when he traveled through Wisconsin with McCarthy at his side. Ike had contempt for McCarthy’s unsubstantiated charges of Communist ties to bring down opponents. But he believed that the Democrats had given McCarthy credibility by their “neglect, indifference and arrogance,” which had allowed communism to penetrate “dangerously into important regions of our government and our economic life.” Eisenhower condemned “un-American practices applied against the individual,” but he wholeheartedly accepted McCarthy’s objective of removing subversive elements from power in Washington. In a speech in Montana, the general promised that his administration would “find the pinks; we will find the Communists; we will find the disloyal.” His language reflected the exaggerated fear of Communist subversion that had become accepted understanding.
To put some distance between himself and McCarthy during his campaign through Wisconsin, Eisenhower included a paragraph in a major speech at Milwaukee praising George Marshall, who, like Jenner, McCarthy had made the focus of anti-Communist attacks. But when pressured by aides to drop the positive references to his former mentor, Eisenhower agreed. Although he had given McCarthy a private dressing-down for his abuse of due process in going after “subversives,” Ike refused to take him on publicly in Wisconsin. In fact, the most he did in a speech at Green Bay was say that he did not share McCarthy’s methods, but agreed with his purposes in aiming to rid the government of “the incompetents, the dishonest and above all the subversive and disloyal.”
Despite Eisenhower’s public complaint about McCarthy’s methods, the impression he gave was of someone more concerned with removing the Reds in government than with how it was done. In his Milwaukee speech, he echoed the cry of the Republican right that the loss of Eastern Europe and China had been the result of betrayal in Washington. Communist penetration of the American government, he said, “meant—in its most ugly triumph—treason itself.” To right this wrong, he promised to “aid by peaceful means, but only by peaceful means, the right to live in freedom.” He gave no encouragement to those who favored military steps to free Soviet satellite countries, but implied that he would go beyond containment to liberate the “enslaved” peoples of Eastern Europe.
Korea was the greatest source of voter concern and Eisenhower’s most effective campaign issue. The eagerness among Americans for an end to a war that had already cost some 35,000 lives and close to 90,000 wounded was palpable. Although Eisenhower offered no specifics on how he would achieve an honorable peace, his military credentials and a promise to travel to Korea for a firsthand assessment of the fighting convinced voters that he had an unstated plan for ending the conflict. On October 24, he announced his first postelection priority as “ending the Korean War…. That job requires a personal trip to Korea…. Only in that w
ay could I learn how best to serve the American people in the cause of peace.”
Truman, who saw Eisenhower’s pledge to go to Korea as nothing more than a campaign tactic and as “demagoguery … almost beneath contempt,” publicly dismissed Ike’s statement on Korea by saying that the general had been in agreement with everything the administration had been doing there, and told voters that “no professional general has ever made a good President. The art of war is too different from the art of civilian government.” Truman’s warning was of no consequence. Eisenhower won decisively—55 percent of the popular vote and a five-to-one margin in the Electoral College.
Because Truman understood that public sentiment was on Eisenhower’s side and that conceding anything to the Chinese would have increased the animus toward him and the Democrats, he refused to bend on the POW exchange. He also viewed POW freedom to choose as humane and a defeat for the Communists, which he was avid to achieve for the thousands of Americans who had sacrificed their lives in the fighting. He considered any sort of victory a warning to the Soviets and Chinese not to test the United States in combat again. Since the outcome in Korea would form a significant part of his presidential legacy, he was determined not to change policy.
To be sure, had Truman accepted the Chinese proposal on prisoner exchange, he would have lost some additional public support and the sense of satisfaction from forcing the Communists into an embarrassing concession, but he probably could have ended the war and spared the country continuing losses. Instead, he allowed the politics of foreign policy and the reach for a more positive legacy than the rescue of South Korea to take precedence. As a consequence, he continued what had already become a pointless war from which nothing more was to be gained.