It was left to Eisenhower to end the conflict. A war-weary public and a military commander’s understanding of battlefield possibilities dictated his actions. True to his word following his election, he traveled to Korea at the end of November 1952 to gain a firsthand impression of possible benefits from a fresh offensive. His designated secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, as well as Mark Clark, the commander of U.S. forces in Korea, and Syngman Rhee, urged an all-out offensive that could drive the Chinese out of North Korea and unify the peninsula under Rhee’s control. But the president-elect’s visit to Korea, where he spoke with front-line troops and flew a reconnaissance mission over the dividing line between entrenched forces, convinced him that an assault on well-fortified Chinese positions would result in terrible casualties and little gain. He concluded that “small attacks on small hills would not end this war.”
Eisenhower did not see a major offensive with nuclear weapons as the right answer either. MacArthur urged him to drive the Chinese and North Korean troops off the peninsula with atomic bombs and then threaten China with a bombing campaign if it refused to abandon its war of “aggression.” Some in the Republican Party, who believed their own rhetoric about rollback and liberation in Korea, China, and Eastern Europe by all means, were disappointed at Eisenhower’s restraint.
Although unwilling to resort to MacArthur’s drastic measures, Eisenhower did not discount the value of threats in forcing the Chinese to resume negotiations. He gave every indication that he was considering an escalation of military actions in Korea and against China’s mainland: an announcement that he was removing the Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan Strait, which freed Nationalist troops on Taiwan to attack the Communists, a reversal of the original rationale for having it there to prevent a Communist invasion of the island; his visit to Korea; a well-publicized consultation with MacArthur on how to end the war; and congressional testimony by the new secretary of defense, Charles Wilson, who hinted at stepped-up military actions in Korea, were all intended to scare the Chinese into a new round of negotiations that could lead to an armistice.
Mao, however, was not intimidated. He correctly believed that China’s defensive lines in Korea would hold against any new assault, and that Eisenhower would not resort to atomic bombs because of the certain condemnation by world opinion and the danger of a nuclear exchange with Moscow. Mao calculated that Eisenhower’s public descriptions of the war as “intolerable” meant not an all-out campaign to win but an indication that the Americans would be the first to offer an olive branch, which the Chinese could then agree to as a face-saving way to return to the peace table. Consequently, in February 1953, when Mark Clark proposed an exchange of sick and wounded POWs as a first step toward renewed discussions, the Chinese were ready to accept.
At the end of March, Peking agreed to a mutual repatriation of wounded and sick POWs. The Chinese followed this announcement with a proposal that prisoners who refused repatriation should be transferred to a neutral state, where the question of their ultimate location could be settled without continuing pressure from any of the belligerents. Peking tied this proposal to a resumption of the armistice talks at Panmunjom.
Eisenhower was ready to accept and told his National Security Council on April 8 that he would settle for an armistice that divided the peninsula along current North-South lines, which meant largely a return to the prewar status quo. Dulles and Wilson opposed a truce that left a Communist regime in the North. Dulles thought that the United States could not “get much out of a Korean settlement until we have shown—before all Asia—our clear superiority by giving the Chinese one hell of a licking.” An armistice conceding North Korea to Communist control was an affirmation not of rollback or liberation, as promised in the campaign, but of Truman’s containment policy.
Having considered a Dulles proposal for an offensive aimed at occupying about a third of all North Korea, the area below Pyongyang and Wonsan, Eisenhower concluded that the cost of such an attack would be too high and was more likely to prolong than end the war. On April 16, 1953, in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he rejected counsels of renewed military action and urged an end to the U.S.-USSR arms race: They were a formula for “perpetual fear and tension…. Every gun that is made,” he asserted, “every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Coming from a general who could not be dismissed as a soft-minded pacifist opposed to all wars, Eisenhower’s preference for negotiations over expanded combat in Korea carried exceptional weight with all but the most doctrinaire anti-Communists at home and abroad.
His speech was a prelude to renewed truce talks at the end of April. It would take three more months before both sides could find common ground for an armistice. During that time, Eisenhower struggled against right-wing Republicans and South Korea’s Rhee, who opposed a settlement that could not be described as a decisive defeat of the Communists: militants in his party and Rhee complained that leaving Kim in power was appeasement of an aggressor and a prescription for another future attack on the South by the Communist North. Conservative Republican opponents of Ike’s policy privately observed that if Truman had done what Eisenhower was doing, he would have been impeached. Counterpressures from American public opinion, which was eager to end the fighting (84 percent of an April 1953 poll favored a settlement), and from NATO allies, who considered the war a distraction from the larger issue of European security, gave Eisenhower leverage to move forward in the peace talks.
At times, however, it seemed as if the president, in the words of one American diplomat, was “trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.” Syngman Rhee was especially difficult to bring in line with Eisenhower’s decision to end the fighting. In mid-June, the South Korean president released some 27,000 Communist POWs, who took refuge in South Korea. It was an embarrassment to both Pyongyang and Peking that so many of their citizens would refuse repatriation. Rhee’s action, tied to the possibility that he might reject any final settlement and continue fighting, jeopardized prospects for an armistice.
To prevent Rhee, whose troops manned two-thirds of the front lines, from blocking a truce, Eisenhower agreed to a mutual defense treaty between Washington and Seoul, promising to defend South Korea against any future attack, pledged economic assistance to rebuild the South, and agreed to support a postwar political conference that would seek ways to unify the peninsula. Despite these commitments , Rhee, a reckless nationalist single-mindedly committed to overthrowing Kim and unifying all Korea under his rule, refused to sign a truce, though he agreed not to obstruct it. He did, however, threaten to resume fighting if a post-armistice conference failed to bring unification. The reality, however, that the United States and other UN allies would not fight with him made this an empty threat. Moreover, Eisenhower made clear to Rhee that any decision he made to go it alone would be an act of national suicide.
Were it not for Eisenhower’s determination to end the war, the conflict might have continued indefinitely, though the settlement was as much dependent on Chinese agreement as that of Washington. Like Eisenhower, Mao saw more to be gained from ending the war in July 1953 than from additional fighting. Having reduced the embarrassment of some 14,000 Chinese and 8,000 North Korean POWs refusing repatriation by transferring them to United Nations supervision, where their decisions to go to Taiwan and South Korea could not be so readily exploited by the United States or Seoul, and having launched successful last-minute offensives against South Korean positions that brought the truce line closer to the thirty-eighth parallel, Peking could end the war with plausible assertions of victory. Where the United States’ willingness to fight in Korea gave it greater credibility with NATO and Japan as a reliable ally, the Chinese emerged from the conflict with higher standing as a nation able to mount an effective resistance to the world’s principal superpower. A Chinese general announced shortly after the armistice went into effect, “The time has go
ne forever when the Western powers were able to conquer a country in the East merely by mounting several cannons along the coast.”
The war was a demonstration of poor leadership by all the belligerents. Kim and Rhee had been equally determined to destroy the other’s power and unify the peninsula under his rule; neither could imagine a coalition government for the good of the country. Nor did either of them foresee the sort of mass destruction of life and infrastructure with no discernible gain at the end of the fighting. Their respective convictions that only their kind of governance would serve Korea blinded them to the horrors of the civil war.
By the close of the conflict, neither Truman nor Mao had done much better than Kim or Rhee. Truman’s initial decision to respond to Kim’s aggression made eminent good sense. To stand aside would have carried unacceptable political consequences at home and abroad. But crossing the parallel proved to be reckless, serving neither the United States in general nor the White House in particular: it cost thousands of additional American lives, provoked antagonisms with China for another twenty years, and largely destroyed Truman’s capacity to lead. The only initial gain for his administration was in quieting political attacks from the American right, which would have pilloried the president and Acheson for missing a chance to liberate North Korea from communism. But the invasion of the North bought Truman only six months of bipartisan support. Once he rejected MacArthur’s ill-advised strategy for a wider war with China and, if necessary, a showdown with Soviet Russia, he became the object of a renewed right-wing campaign of vilification.
Mao cannot be seen as any wiser than Truman or the Koreans for having entered the conflict. China’s battlefield casualties were horrendous—more than a million—and the war delayed badly needed investments in the domestic economy to raise the country’s miserably low standard of living. The alternative of a Korea under United Nations control would have posed no significant threat to Peking and would have freed it from the difficulties that reclusive North Korean regimes continued to pose to peace in northeast Asia. (Pyongyang’s reach for nuclear weapons fifty years later became an obstacle to China’s improved dealings with the United States, Japan, and South Korea.) The United States had no intention of making Korea into a permanent outpost of anticommunism from which it would work to destabilize Mao’s regime. But all the apocalyptic talk in the United States and Peking and Moscow about destroying communism and capitalism made more rational considerations on both sides all but impossible. It is an object lesson in why public officials should speak softly, especially when they have the wherewithal to strike with a big stick.
Stalin’s Russia did not escape the negative consequences of the war either. Although Stalin made only limited commitments of men and matériel to the fighting, he was a prime mover in causing and continuing the war for three years. His hopes of seeing a Communist regime across the entire Korean Peninsula and of negotiating an end to the U.S. occupation of Japan by making it a neutral country in the Cold War were disappointed when Truman decided to resist Kim’s invasion of the South and make a separate peace agreement with Tokyo that included U.S. bases in the home islands.
Only with Stalin’s death from a stroke at the age of seventy-three did Moscow weigh in on ending the Korean conflict. The new Soviet leaders—the troika of Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenty Beria, and Georgy Malenkov—fearful of a war with the United States, for which they felt unprepared, launched a peace campaign. “There is not one disputed … question that can not be decided by peaceful means on the basis of mutual understanding of interested countries,” Malenkov declared in a well-publicized speech on March 15, 1953, ten days after Stalin had died.
The world was fortunate to have escaped a Soviet-American conflict in Stalin’s last days. The gamble he and Mao had made that the United States would not resort to nuclear weapons to end the Korean War and destroy Communist rule in Korea and China had succeeded. But Soviet advocacy of peaceful coexistence after Stalin’s death was evidence of how doubtful the government’s new leaders were about Stalin’s foreign policies toward Europe and Asia. “In the days leading up to Stalin’s death we believed that America would invade the Soviet Union and we would go to war,” Khrushchev recalled.
In the last months of his life, Stalin continued to hold extraordinary power through the continuing intimidation of everyone inside and outside of his government, including even his closest associates. No one felt safe from his wrath, which could explode against the most loyal of his subordinates: if they were lucky, they would find themselves in exile; if unlucky, imprisoned, tortured, and executed for crimes they never committed. The men most directly around him saw Stalin as now “more capricious, irritable, and brutal” than ever. At all-night bacchanalias, he would take pleasure in humiliating guests by making them sing or dance. Khrushchev remembered that “when Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.”
Stalin saw conspiracies everywhere. “I trust no one, not even myself,” he said in front of two associates, who he seemed not to notice. Perhaps it was his way of warning those around him that he could not control his paranoia, which could victimize anyone who had close contact with him. Before he ate or drank, a food tester would consume some of the food and drink to assure it was not poisoned.
In 1953, the principal target of Stalin’s suspicions was Jewish doctors, who he believed were trying to kill him—or at least, so he said. It was a renewal of the anti-Semitic outburst that had resulted in the persecution of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1948. Stalin accused the doctors of being pro-Zionist traitors more loyal to the new state of Israel than to the Soviet Union, pawns of Wall Street Jewish bankers and of American agents working to destroy Soviet Russia’s Communist rule.
The Jewish wives of top Soviet officials like Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Mikhail Kalinin, the head of state, were imprisoned for crimes against the Soviet government. The chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Solomon Mikhoels, a leading actor and director of the Moscow Yiddish Theater who had entertained Stalin with private performances of King Lear and other Shakespearean dramas, was assassinated in 1948, alleged to have been killed in a car accident. In August 1952, in what came to be known as “the Night of the Murdered Poets,” twenty-four Jewish writers and poets were executed in the basement of Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison.
The alleged doctors’ plot may have arisen from Stalin’s need for a domestic crisis that would continue to make him the indispensable chief. When he distributed the transcripts of the Jewish doctors’ confessions to his associates, Stalin told them, “You are blind like young kittens; what will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies.” In January 1953, as the likelihood of a settlement in Korea promised to remove international tensions that Stalin used to sustain his reputation as the nation’s best defender—the man who had rescued Soviet Russia from Nazi conquest and now protected it from American capitalists—he went public with the doctors’ conspiracy, which allegedly served American-Zionist interests intent on destroying communism.
Stalin’s last hours were a window on the terror he had instilled in everyone—from the ordinary citizen to the highest officials. On March 1, 1953, at the height of the so-called doctors’ plot, after he had suffered a stroke, Stalin’s guards and closest Kremlin associates resisted calling a physician; they feared that he might see it as an attempt to kill him and would retaliate against them if he recovered. When doctors were finally summoned, the physicians, according to one of the guards, “were all trembling like us…. Their hands were trembling so much that they could not even get his shirt off.” They were “terrified to touch Stalin,” to take his pulse.
Felled by a massive stroke or “cerebral catastrophe,” Stalin lingered for three days, falling in and out of consciousness. His incapacity brought forth an explosion of invective from Beria, who seemed elated at the imminent death of his tormentor and protector. During moments of waking when it seemed that Stalin might recover, Beria w
ould kneel beside him and kiss his hand. The “magnates,” the Politburo insiders who took up the death watch, exhibited feelings of elation and grief at the dictator’s passing.
Although the full extent of Stalin’s crimes—some 20 million people killed and additional millions exiled to the gulag—would not be fully revealed until after his death, it was an open secret among attentive citizens. No one in the Soviet Union could doubt that they lived in a police state, where the slightest dissent could cost them their life or, at a minimum, the freedom to enjoy the meager Third World existence socialism had inflicted on the country. Yet open protests against Soviet rule were unheard of. Victory in the war and a long history of paternalistic governance by monarchs—whether czars or Soviets—joined with a sense of permanent foreign danger to give Stalin an unshakable hold on his people. Were it not for the regime’s terror tactics, which made opposition life-threatening, a reach for a different kind of government that reduced the likelihood of a cold war is imaginable.
Despite the East-West split that put the world constantly on edge and contributed to the onset of the Korean fighting, Russia and the United States managed to avert a third twentieth-century conflict that would have been even more devastating than the century’s two earlier wars of mass destruction. The end of the Korean conflict, however, did not call a halt to the fighting between Communists or Soviet-Chinese surrogates, as Washington saw them, and the United States. The Korean armistice temporarily ended America’s use of combat forces to fight Asian Communists. But events in Indochina posed new challenges to Washington’s determination to halt the advance of communism in Asia, and once again tested Moscow’s and Washington’s hopes of averting a larger, unprecedented nuclear exchange.