Sources about the cold war

I said "so long" to Puller after three snowbound days with the 1st Marine Division, 4,000 feet above sea level in the sub-zero weather of Changjin Reservoir. I climbed aboard a waiting C-47 at Koto Airstrip and looked around.

Sixteen shivering Marine casualties - noses and eyes dripping from cold - huddled in their bucket seats. They were the
last of more than 2,500 Marine casualties to be evacuated by the U.S. Air Force under conditions considered flatly impossible. Whatever this campaign was - retreat, withdrawal, or defeat - one thing can be said with certainty. Not in the Marine Corps' long and bloody history has there been anything like it. And if you'll pardon a personal recollection, not at Tarawa or Iwo Jima, where casualties were much greater, did I see men suffer as much.

The wonder isn't that they fought their way out against overwhelming odds but that they were able to survive the cold and fight at all. So far as the Marines themselves are concerned, they ask that two things be recorded:

1. They didn't break. They came out of Changjin Reservoir as an organized unit with most of their equipment.

2. They brought out all their wounded. They brought out many of their dead. And most of those they didn't bring out they buried.

It was not always easy to separate dead from wounded among the frozen figures that lay strapped to radiators of jeeps and trucks. I know because I watched them come in from Yudam to Hagaru, 18 miles of icy hell, five days ago.

That same day I stood in the darkened corner of a wind-whipped tent and listened to a Marine officer brief his men for the march to Koto the following day. I have known him for a long time but in the semidarkness, with my face half-covered by my parka, he didn't recognize me. When he did the meeting broke up. When we were alone, he cried. After that he was all right.

I hope he won't mind my reporting he cried, because he's a very large Marine and a very tough guy.

He cried because he had to have some sort of emotional release; because all his men were heroes and wonderful people; because the next day he was going to have to submit them to another phase in the trial by blood and ice. Besides, he wasn't the only one who cried.

In the Marines' twelve-day, forty-mile trek from Yudam to the "bottom of the hill," strange and terrible things happened.

Thousands of Chinese troops - the Marines identified at least six divisions totaling 60,000 men - boiled from every canyon and rained fire from every ridge. Sometimes they came close enough to throw grenades into trucks, jeeps, and

General Walker was very correct and absolutely frank with me. He said he still felt that the front was no place for a woman, but that orders were orders and that from now on I could be assured of absolutely equal treatment.

"If something had happened to you, an American woman," the general explained, "I would have gotten a terrible press. The American public might never have forgiven me. So please be careful and don't get yourself killed or captured."

General Walker kept his promise of equal treatment, and from then on, so far as the United States Army was concerned, I went about my job with no more hindrance than the men.

If only his speech had measured up to this introduction! And since he has tried, not once but several times, to make a vote-getting issue out of our ordeal in Korea, I shall speak on this subject and address myself to the record.

We are fighting in Korea, the General declares, because the American Government grossly underestimated the Soviet threat; because the Government allowed America to become weak; because American weakness compelled us to withdraw our forces from Korea; because we abandoned China to the communists; and, finally, because we announced to all the world that we had written off most of the. Far East.

That's what he says - now let's look at the record.

First, the General accuses the Government of having underestimated the Soviet threat. But what about the General himself? At the end of the war he was a professional soldier of great influence and prestige, to whom the American people listened with respect. What did he have to say about the Soviet threat? In the years after the war, the General himself saw "no reason" - as he later wrote - why the Russian system of government and Western democracy "could not live side by side in the world." In November, 1945, he even told the House Military Affairs Committee: "Nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States."

I have no wish to blow any trumpets here. But in March, 1946, I said: "We must forsake any hope that the Soviet Union is going to lie still and lick her awful wounds. She's not. Peace treaties that reflect her legitimate demands, friendly governments on her frontiers and an effective United Nations Organization should be sufficient security. But evidently they are not and she intends to advance her aims, many of them objectives of the Czars, to the utmost."

It was a difficult time to change field commanders, but I acquired one of the best in General Matthew Ridgway. An experienced leader with aggressive and fighting qualities, he took command of the Eighth Army at its position near the 38th parallel. After inspecting his new command, he felt he could repulse any enemy attempt to dislodge it. On New Year's Day, however, the Reds launched a general offensive in tremendous force, making penetrations of up to 12 miles. It forced the Eighth Army into further withdrawal. By January 4th, the enemy had recaptured Seoul, and by January 7th, the Eighth Army had retired to new positions roughly 70 miles south of the 38th parallel.

It was at this time that General Walker issued his famous "stand or die" order. The 1st Cavalry 25th Division were freshly arrived. Like 24th Division before them, the new outfits had to learn for themselves how to cope with this Indian-style warfare for which they were so unprepared. Their soldiers were not yet battle-toughened. Taking into account the overwhelming odds, some front-line generals worried about the performance of their men and told us so privately.

In his autobiography, Ridgway recalls a 1950 meeting where the Joint Chiefs of Staff wondered what they could do to restrain General Douglas MacArthur from his head-over-heels plunge toward the Chinese border and disaster in Korea. The chiefs could already look at the map and recognize that MacArthur had arrayed his troops as for a parade, divided their columns and left between them the mountain where enemies could assemble in peace and await the securest chance for war. The chiefs had passed the hours helplessly struggling between their awe of a commander who had been riding with the Cavalry when they were in rompers and their awareness of his terminal folly.

Ridgway was then only deputy Chief of Staff and forbidden to speak up in the company of his superiors. Crisis compelled him to break the laws of silence at last. "We owe it to ourselves," he said, to call MacArthur to halt; and it must be done now because even tomorrow could be too late. The chiefs sustained the shock of this breach of Old Army custom and continued to sit inert until what they knew might happen did and all too soon.

After the meeting, Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg congratulated him for his courage. His answer was not thanks for the compliment but renewed urgings that MacArthur be curbed. "Oh, what's the use," Vandenberg replied. "He won't listen." And, thereafter of course, it would be for Ridgway to restore the ruin of the Korean campaign.

On the hill, soldiers were silencing some of the enemy fire. It was now seven forty-five. It did not seem possible that so much could have happened since the enemy had struck three quarters of an hour before.

As the intensity of fire slackened slightly, soldiers started bringing in the wounded from the hills, carrying them on their backs. I walked over to the aid station. The mortars had been set up right next to the medic's end of the schoolhouse. The guns provided a nerve-racking accompaniment for the doctors and first-aid men as they ministered to the wounded. Bullets were still striking this end of the building, and both doctors and wounded had to keep low to avoid being hit. Because of the sudden rush of casualties, all hands were frantically busy.

One medic was running short of plasma but did not dare leave his patients long enough to try to round up some more. I offered to administer the remaining plasma and passed about an hour there, helping out as best I could.

My most vivid memory of the hour is Captain Logan Weston limping into the station with a wound in his leg. He was patched up and promptly turned around and headed for the hills again. Half an hour later he was back with bullets in his shoulder and chest. Sitting on the floor smoking a cigarette, the captain calmly remarked, "I guess I'd better get a shot of morphine now. These last two are beginning to hurt."

Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Picture Post lost his job after publishing a story on the Korean War. He wrote about the controversy in his book Of This Our Time (1982)

During their time in Korea Hardy and Cameron made three picture stories, the most dramatic of these being the record of General MacArthur's landing at Inchon, the port of Seoul. Seoul was not only the capital of Korea but the key centre of

The Inchon landing was not the only story our two men had sent back, and one of the others posed a problem. Text and photographs showed vividly how the South Koreans, with at least the connivance of their American allies, were treating their political prisoners, suspected opponents of the tyrant Synghman Rhee. Rhee himself would in due course be ditched as the insupportable head of an intolerable regime by the American protectors who had kept him in power for so long; but that was still ten years on into the future, and in the meantime Rhee and his henchmen were our gallant allies and the upholders of our Christian democratic way of life. By the 1980s we have all seen treatment of prisoners more openly murderous than that revealed in Hardy's pictures, and Cameron's accompanying article would today be accounted mild. But in the climate of that time, with British and Australian troops involved in the fighting, any criticism of South Koreans was certain to be regarded as criticism of 'our' side. Such criticism, moreover, being anti-Western, must inevitably be 'pro-Eastern', and hence - with only a small distortion of language - 'Communist propaganda', a crime of which I was already being accused by my employer.

The dispute that rages between General Douglas MacArthur and the Truman administration over how to win the Korean war has reached fever heat again. The administration may shortly ask the general to clear with broad foreign policy issues.

This may or may not prove acceptable to MacArthur, but State Department officials as well as some others with great influence at the White House privately say something must be done to prevent a repetition of last week's exchange of shocks and harsh words between Tokyo and Washington.

President Truman circulated last December a firm, government-wide directive declaring that any statement on foreign policy by any official or employee of the government in a speech, article or other public utterance, should be cleared with the State Department. Informants said today that order was called to MacArthur's attention at that time.

Friday night, Washington time, MacArthur left Tokyo for the Thirty-eighth Parallel area of Korea to order United Nations forces to cross into North Korea as tactical requirements made necessary. Before leaving Tokyo he issued a statement to the press.

In this statement he made a bid for peace talks with his opposite number on the Communist side, said the Chinese Reds were licked and incapable of waging modem war and warned that if the United Nations launched attacks on Chinese bases and coastal area the Red nation would probably suffer military collapse.

This statement, a check showed, caught the State Department completely unawares. It apparently also caught President Truman without advance notice. After several hours of parleying, including a talk between Secretary of State Acheson and Mr. Truman, a rather meaningless statement was issued, designed to say on Saturday that Washington had nothing to do with what MacArthur had declared Friday night.

The statements said MacArthur had authority to conduct military operations but that political issues which "he has stated are beyond his responsibilities are being dealt with in the U.N. and by the governments having troops in Korea."

The key MacArthur clause which set off the alarm here was that the United Nations could probably succeed in forcing a military collapse of Red China by a limited coastal attack and base-bombing war. A Tokyo dispatch yesterday suggested MacArthur probably was trying to divert the Chinese Reds' attention from Korea to the danger of a coastal attack.

Whatever his objective, any statement he makes - even mingled in with "ifs" - about extending the war in the Far East always sends huge shudders among the Canadian, French, British and other friendly governments. When the Europeans come in to the State Department wanting to know "what does MacArthur propose to do," Acheson and his aides get upset about the problems of holding together the political side of the coalition of which MacArthur is military commander.

I was impressed with Kennedy. I remember liking his face, which was sometimes stern but which often broke into a good-natured smile. As for Nixon... he was an unprincipled puppet, which is the most dangerous kind. I was very glad Kennedy won the election... I joked with him that we had cast the deciding ballot in his election to the Presidency over that son-of-a-bitch Richard Nixon. When he asked me what I meant, I explained that by waiting to release the U-2 pilot Gary Powers until after the American election, we kept Nixon from being able to claim that he could deal with the Russians; our ploy made a difference of at least half a million votes, which gave Kennedy the edge he needed.

Khrushchev had studied the events of the Bay of Pigs; he would have understood if Kennedy had left Castro alone or destroyed him but when Kennedy was rash enough to strike at Cuba but not bold enough to finish the job, Khrushchev decided he was dealing with an inexperienced young leader who could be intimidated and blackmailed.

Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev emerged victorious or defeated cheerful or shaken. Each had probed the other for weakness and found none. Khrushchev had not been swayed by Kennedy's reason and charm. Kennedy had not been panicked by Khrushchev's tough talk.

There is reason to believe that Khrushchev took Kennedy's measure at their Vienna meeting in June 1961, and decided this was a young man who would shrink from hard decisions... There is no evidence to support the belief that Khrushchev ever questioned America's power. He questioned only the President's readiness to use it. As he once told Robert Frost, he came to believe that Americans are "too liberal to fight.'

John F. Kennedy called the best brains he could assemble. He gathered them from as far away as Moscow. Every embassador that served in Moscow that was still alive was present. The brightest people that understood the Soviet Union were present. They met every day for three weeks. They became so cozy that President Kennedy began calling them his crisis club. His crisis club. And they warned. They said, "Mr. President, don't back Khrushchev in to a corner. He is an impulsive man. He is an impulsive man. You remember when he took a shoe off at the United Nations and banged on a desk. He might very well push a button that will send missiles toward the United States. Don't back him in to a corner. Give him room to maneuver." That was their advice.

John F. Kennedy did not take it. He decided, he went before the crisis club after about three weeks and he said, "Gentlemen, I have decided on a boycott. We are going to have to stop any more missiles from going in to Cuba, and we are going to call upon the Soviet Union to withdraw the missiles that they have already planted there." One in the crisis club said, "Mr. President, what you are describing is an act of war. Are you prepared to wage war with the Soviet Union?" The president said, "We'll make it as easy as we can on the Soviets. We'll offer to take our missiles back from Turkey and Greece. They are worn, useless missiles that we were going to take back anyway, but on the world's stage, it may give them, save them some loss of faith. So we will offer to take back our missiles from Turkey and Greece, but we will insist that they remove their missiles from Cuba, and if they don't, we will have to stop them."

One of the members of this group said, "Mr. President, what if they don't stop? What if the Soviets turn you down, and continue sending missiles to Cuba, and you order them to stop, and what if they don't stop?" The president said, "We will follow the procedures of the sea. We will fire a warning shot across the bow, and if they don't stop then, we will attack." One of the members said, "Mr. President, what if the situation were reversed? What if the Soviets tried to stop our ships on the high seas and maybe even fired a warning shot. What would you do?" Jack Kennedy thought that over a bit. "Well," he said, "it would depend on the circumstances, of course, but most likely I would have to take military action." And this man said, "And what makes you think the Soviets won't do the same?" Now there were a lot of Monday morning statesman afterward that said they knew that the Soviets would back down. I am here to report to you, because I had sources in that meeting, in those meetings. They told me exactly what was said. President Kennedy said, "I don' t know what the Soviets will do."

For the first time in twenty years Americans can carry their head high because the president of the United States had stood up to the premier of Russia and made him back down.

The accounts of the crisis did not make clear that it was a power confrontation, that the power of the USA was incomparably superior to that of the USSR, and that the leaders of both nations knew this to be a fact. The United States, it is worth repeating, could have erased every important Soviet military installation and population centre in two or three hours while the strike capability of the USSR was negligible. Although Kennedy held the trump cards, he granted the Communist Empire a privileged sanctuary in the Caribbean by means of the "no invasion" pledge.

Jack Kennedy was one of the two Presidents of the United States whom it has been my privilege to know well. I came to love and admire him in the sense that I did Gaitskell. He was generous, very warm-hearted and a great humanitarian. As I came to know him better, I got to feel less and less that he was a doer. A thinker, a man of imagination, a man of inspiration, a man of feeling - yes. But even though I be in a minority, here again I think he was not what I regard as a great doer. I know that in writing this I shall be reminded of Cuba, where Kennedy seemed to act with the utmost decisiveness. Yet I have a nagging feeling that Cuba was in a way a decision made for him. But he charmed Khrushchev as he charmed me and as he charmed everybody else. All I can say here is that there has been no politician, Gaitskell apart, in whose presence I have felt more fascinated, charmed and excited about the possibilities of power.

And I think that this was fully accepted by President Kennedy and by those of us associated with him. And it was fully accepted by President Johnson when he succeeded as President. The loss of Vietnam would trigger the loss of Southeast Asia, and conceivably even the loss of India, and would strengthen the Chinese and the Soviet position across the world, weakening the security of Western Europe and weakening the security of North America. This was the way we viewed it; I'm not arguing (we viewed it) correctly - don't misunderstand me - but that is the way we viewed it. ...

There were three groups of individuals among his advisers. One group believed that the situation (in South Vietnam) was moving so well that we could make a statement that we'd begin withdrawals and complete them by the end of 1965. Another group believed that the situation wasn't moving that well, but that our mission was solely training and logistics; we'd been there long enough to complete the training, if the South Vietnamese were capable of absorbing it, and if we hadn't proven successful, it's because we were incapable of accomplishing that mission and therefore we were justified in beginning withdrawal. The third group believed we hadn't reached the point where we were justified in withdrawing, and we shouldn't withdraw.

Kennedy listened to the debate, and finally sided with those who believed that either we had succeeded, or were succeeding, and therefore could begin our withdrawal; or alternatively we hadn't succeeded, but that ... we'd been there long enough to test our ability to succeed, and if we weren't succeeding we should begin the withdrawal because it was impossible to accomplish that mission. In any event, he made the decision (to begin withdrawing advisers) that day, and he did announce it. It was highly contested...

Kennedy hadn't said before he died whether, faced with the loss of Vietnam, he would (completely) withdraw; but I believe today that had he faced that choice, he would have withdrawn rather than substitute US combat troops for Vietnamese forces to save South Vietnam. I think he would have concluded that US combat troops could not save Vietnam if Vietnam troops couldn't save it. That was the statement he in effect made publicly before his death, but at that time he hadn't had to choose between losing Vietnam, on the one hand, or putting in US combat troops on the other. Had he faced the decision, I think he would have accepted the loss of Vietnam and refused to put in US combat troops.

Kenneth O'Donnell, Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1983)

Kennedy had told (Kenneth O'Donnell) in the spring of 1963 that he could not pull out of Vietnam until he was reelected, "So we had better make damned sure I am reelected." ... At a White House reception on Christmas eve, a month after he succeeded to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson told the Joint Chiefs: "Just get me elected, and then you can have your war."

I. F. Stone, a journalist, wrote an article on Kennedy after he was assassinated in 1963.

What if the Russians had refused to back down and remove their missiles from Cuba? What if they had called our bluff and war had begun, and escalated? How would the historians of mankind, if a fragment survived, have regarded the events of October?... Since this is the kind of bluff that can easily be played once too often, and that his successors may feel urged to imitate, it would be well to think it over carefully before canonizing Kennedy as an apostle of peace.

In spite of having lead a rather reckless personal life of apparent sexual excess - something I do not care about personally one way or the other - JFK's popularity continues to grow. I think this is for substantial, not insubstantial, reasons.

It is now apparent, with the release of many classified documents, the writing of many memoirs, and the release of many secret office recordings, that JFK was a real skeptic about the use of military force in combat, and that although he believed in a very strong military readiness posture for the United States, and took his Cold War responsibilities extremely seriously, he repeatedly used military force, or rather was prepared to use it, only as a last resort, if all other options had been exhausted. For example:

(1) He refused to bail out the failed CIA Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba with U.S. troops, as the JCS desired him to do;

(2) He ultimately refused to either bomb or invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He made all preparations to do so, and made sure the USSR saw these preparations, and used this impending readiness as a powerful diplomatic tool to leverage Kruschev, but his daily strategy during this crisis was to continue to prepare for military action, while daily stalling the hawks who demanded the use of military force. In doing so he probably prevented a nuclear war, for we now know that the Russian rocket forces in Cuba had permission to use tactical nuclear weapons (launched by FROG missiles) against any US invasion forces, WITHOUT the advance permission of Moscow. As Robert McNamara said in 1992, if thousands of US sailors and Marines and Army troops had been "fried" invading Cuba, it would have demanded a retaliatory response by JFK and the nuclear war with the USSR would then have probably been unstoppable, escalating day-by-day into a true Armageddon. Ted Sorenson, who knew JFK's political instincts better than anyone else, has said that even though the Cuban invasion was "imminent" at the time Kruschev capitulated and agreed to remove the missiles, he was confident JFK would have found ways and means to stall the hawks in the USG and delay, or forestall, an invasion on a day-by-day basis, even though it was theoretically approved for Tuesday (I think), 2 days after Kruschev capitulated.

(3) JFK clearly was intent on withdrawing form Vietnam in 1965; he was disgusted with the entire military and political situation in Vietnam, was angry that we had become enmeshed and entrapped there with so many advisors, and was determined to right this error after his re-election.

(4) JFK took the Cold War seriously, but in the right way, and over the right issues. Berlin was important (because it did involve serious issues of not appeasing a superpower bully, whose appetite might then only be whetted for more); Vietnam (which was increasingly apparent to be a local civil war and not truly a vital superpower issue) was not. JFK wanted to defeat communism, but NOT on the battlefield...he wanted to defeat them in the Space Race, the ultimate superpower propaganda contest in which national greatness and the validity of two competing systems were going to be measured by technological prowess and economic strength, not by a destructive war. JFK wanted to promote the positive values of the West and the USA through volunteer service...through the Peace Corps.

(5) JFK wanted above all else to avoid an accidental, unintentional World War in the Nuclear Age. His own WW II experiences (in which he learned to be very skeptical about military leadership and so-called expertise), his study of Barbara Tuchman's book "The Guns of August" about WW I, and the fresh memory of the Korea stalemate in Asia all made him very cautious about the use of military force. He wanted to go to war only if we HAD TO...not because the hawks in the USG wanted to. And if we "had to" go to war, he wanted to ensure it was over a vital interest like Soviet aggression in Europe, not over a sideshow in Southeast Asia where US interest were not directly threatened.

(6) This man chose a life of public service, when he could, instead, have rolled up in a ball of self-pity and lived a selfish life of luxury all alone, feeling sorry for himself because of his serious illness (addison's disease) and his back pain (which was constant and unremitting). Yet all those who knew him well said he never uttered a word of self-pity, and had a genuine optimism about the future of man, about the positive role [and great responsibility] of the United States in the 20th century, and genuinely believed in the credo of public service that he so openly promoted.

(7) JFK became very courageous on civil rights in 1963, after a couple of years of dithering in 1961 and 1962. He could not duck the issue any longer, and strongly and firmly came down in favor of equal opportunity in education and proposed a very bold civil rights bill which LBJ got passed in his memory as part of the JFK legacy after his assassination.

(8) JFK's Peace Speech at the American University in June 1963 was a truly remarkable document, just as the Test Ban Treaty in September of 1963 was a noteworthy accomplishment. The Test Ban Treaty was his proudest achievement, and the Peace Speech (which rejected a military PAX AMERICANA and asked Americans to re-evaluate their altitudes about the Soviet Union) challenged both Americans and the Soviets to end the Cold War...a full generation before it finally happened.

In conclusion, regardless of whether people have advanced degrees or not, or think about politics frequently or infrequently, they have a pretty good sense of these things today in America; following the disaster of LBJ's War in Vietnam, and the current disillusionment over America's Iraq adventure, JFK's sober caution in foreign affairs looks pretty good to most Americans. (His one big screw-up was the Bay of Pigs; he openly acknowledged this, and he learned valuable lessons from it about being cautious about the so-called expertise of others, and about the limits of military power.) So does his intelligent, well-informed and reasoned (but not jingoistic) patriotism, his encouragement of public service, his insatiable curiosity, his support of the arts in America, and his optimism. So does his correct and courageous (if a bit belated) stand on civil rights in America.

America was on the right road in 1963 when he died. After his death, with the exception of the Apollo Moon Landing program and other space initiatives which he began, everything else went downhill fast in the 1960s. Americans know, and appreciate these facts. It is the mainstream historians who get it wrong when they say JFK was not a great President; the man in the street knows better. If he had lived to serve a full 8 years, I think the mainstream historians would treat him more kindly because they would have more concrete, completed accomplishments to write about. (Mainstream historians recognize concrete accomplishments rather than potential, and possibilities, and could-have-beens.) JFK was great because he had the country going in the right direction, avoided a nuclear war (and appeasement) through his caution and firm resolve during the missile crisis, promoted public service and the arts, and was responsible for the robust space program which may be the principal accomplishment for which the the post-WW II USA is remembered 500 years from now (as JFK himself predicted).