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Establishing a Position: July 6-7, 1950 |
 The U.S. military buildup to meet the Korean situation coincides with security initiatives prompted by recent foreign and domestic policy events. U.S. troops fall back along the main Seoul highway.
We have accurate records of everything above mentioned. The records are in my private files. I don't think they should be made public now. The decisions which counted most were made Sunday night and Monday afternoon.
President of the United States Harry S. Truman
Subject: National Security Council Meeting, Thursday, July 6. The President instructed the members of the Security Council at the meeting on Thursday afternoon [July 6] that all proposals for presidential action in the current Korean crisis must be forwarded to him through the machinery of the National Security Council. The President said he did not want any unilateral proposals for his action sent to him directly.
Special Assistant to the President George Elsey
Although President Truman presided at the first [National Security] Council meeting [after the NSC's establishment in 1947] and at occasional meetings thereafter, he did not attend regularly until the beginning of the Korean War.
National Security Council Executive Secretary James Lay
I believe it timely to relate briefly the history of NSC-68 It was under way before Korea. . . . The views of those [in the Government] who were ambivalent about the Soviets and of those who favored a declining military posture did not continue to prevail. An informal consensus of like-minded individuals in [the Departments of] State and Defense coalesced. In the several months prior to “Korea” a meaningful effort gathered effective momentum in which I participated. It had the quiet blessing of Secretary [of State Dean] Acheson. . . . The gravamen of NSC-68 was a realistic assessment of the true nature of Soviet arms, objectives and strategies. Once the President, upon recommendation of the National Security Council members, approved the recommendations, the foundation had then been laid for U.S. rearmament, for the reestablishment of an industrial mobilization base, for the generation of new, modern weapon systems and for NATO and the several follow-on mutual security pacts . . . . It was Korea which vivified NSC-68. But it was the latter which underlay the major increases in military appropriations which collaterally supplied the military means brought to bear in Korea.
Assistant Secretary of the Army Karl Bendetsen
The next thing I wanted to mention . . . is the atomic explosion [by the Soviet Union of its first nuclear device] of the fall of 1949. . . . I came back very shortly after that to Washington and we had a meeting of the National Security Council, and that gave rise to the issuing of the order of the President that we should have a complete reappraisal of all our military security and foreign policy objectives in the light of this situation and that led to what is known as NSC 68. We started right away--[Director of the Policy and Planning Staff] Paul Nitze was put in charge of the work on this from the Department of State side, and we went to work on this problem.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson
This is the thing that makes me so cross when I read things written by alleged scholars that Mr. Truman just sat around having a good time, never realizing the importance of the possession of the bomb by Russia. It changed everything and he realized it ten seconds after it had happened, and within a month he had put the machinery of government into operation to work things out. The thing I am sure you have seen in going over the President’s papers is the extraordinary insight he had into government organization. He was in channels all the time. . . . [H]e had a greater sense of channels in organization than any IBM machine I ever saw. We started in on NSC 68 . . . .
Secretary of State Dean Acheson
As I remember it, at the time NSC 68 was finally approved by the NSC--April 7, as I remember it, 1950; three months before the Korean attack--there was a considerable difference of opinion between the people in the Pentagon and some of us in the State Department as to the magnitude of the effort which was really presupposed by the language which had been approved. I think . . . [military planners] had in mind something which might be in the order of five to ten billion dollars [in growth to the existing Defense budget of less than 14 billion dollars] and might add two divisions and some air wings and some increase in the Navy. I think we’d originally had in mind a much-that this implied a much larger effort than this. . . . Then the Pentagon was doing detailed planning during this period, service by service, and when the Korean attack hit the problem was what kind of plan, how big an effort did you really decide on.
Director, State Department Policy Planning Staff, Paul Nitze
Newspapermen swarmed into the [White House] press room and lobby during the afternoon [of July 7] on tips, largely from the Capitol apparently, supplemented by reports of a "briefing" to be held at the Defense establishment this afternoon, that there was to be an important announcement from the White House. All kinds of rumors circulated.
Assistant Press Secretary Eben Ayers
The president told his three [military] aides . . . to inquire of the Chiefs of Staff of their respective Services how many additional men would be needed by the Services to meet the situation in Korea. As the President put it, "[Defense Secretary] Louie Johnson found out about it, as I knew he would, and he called the Joint Chiefs of Staff together." [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [Omar] Bradley sent a memorandum to Johnson and Johnson forwarded this to the White House without comment. The memorandum dated July 6, was discussed at length at the Cabinet meeting on Friday, July 7. [Press Secretary to the President] Charles Ross and Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen T. Early worked over the press release which was issued at 3 P.M. on the same day. At 3 o'clock simultaneous with the Pentagon [press] release, the President had a meeting with four members of Congress [from the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate], in which he informed them of his action and the reasons therefor.
Administrative Assistant to the President George Elsey
[Defense Secretary Louis Johnson was] . . . becoming a candidate to be the Presidential candidate for the next time. . . .We all thought so. Now let me see why I thought so. I guess it was the number of and kinds of places where he was picking to speak . . . and he was building himself up tremendously--he was trying to. It would seem to us he was doing that. That was one thing I kind of deplored. He was, I think, seeing a lot more political people in different states. The Democratic leaders and so forth and so on. He was handling himself with great confidence and cutting a wide swath. I understood at the time that the President was aware of this embryonic and emerging ambition of his to be the next candidate. . . . Louis was such an outrageously dictatorial man who was so sure that he was the only one that was right, that I'm sure he rubbed [Secretary of State Dean] Acheson the wrong way all the time, particularly over in the White House. He was trying to be the dominant member of the Cabinet. . . . [Johnson's handling of the Defense Department] I thought substantively, by and large, it was quite good. He was capable--quite good. He got himself into so much trouble that he--that's the big problem--he created more problems than he solved, net.
Defense Department General Counsel Felix Larkin
You're right when you say we knew not what was coming when we were having such a fine time "relatively" speaking. . . . Mr. Shakespeare said in Midsummer Night's Dream "Oh what fools these mortals be!" But life wouldn't be any fun if mortals were not what they are. The most interesting thing is to watch the effects of Potomac fever - a peculiar disease that those mortals Puck spoke of who come to Washington to become "important" people in Government get. Woodrow Wilson said some people come here and grow up with responsibility. Some come and just swell up. I've been here permanently almost since Jan. 1, 1935, and I can diagnose that awful disease at once. It skips no office. Congressmen, Senators, clerks, Cabinet officers, Presidential Secretaries and their "sisters and their cousins and their aunts." But life here would be unbearable if it did not happen. Although when a member of the Cabinet has to be fired or a pin slipped into a Senator's balloon it is sometimes a painful proceeding - that is to the one who uses the pin or the firing machinery. Your cousin has had to do it time and again. . . .
President Harry S. Truman
After working all the winter of ’49 and ’50, we had a meeting in the spring of 1950 on the joint Defense-State work. Paul and his colleagues in the Defense Department had worked out a draft paper which later became NSC 68. They thought, entirely rightly and properly, that before this paper even became a tentative draft they ought to sit down with the Secretary of Defense and me and tell us what they were doing, and we could give them some guidance as to whether this was a terrible idea or a good idea or an intermediate idea, or what it was. So in order to be absolutely sure that nothing went wrong, we got Doc Matthews to get in tough with General Burns and arrange for a meeting in my office between the Secretary of Defense and his people, me and my associates, to talk about this matter. This was all done and the meeting was arranged, papers were distributed ten days or a week before it happened, and we . . . met in Paul’s office-the planning staff. . . . We all were agreeable and pleasant . . . and I said, “Now, Paul, you outline what this thing is.” Paul started to outline what this discussion was about, whereupon Louis Johnson, who was leaning back in his chair with feet off the ground, came down with a loud crash on the floor, beat on the table, and said that nobody was going to make any arrangement for him to meet with any other Cabinet officer, and this meeting was over, he wasn’t going to have anything to do with it, he hadn’t seen the papers, he had been bulldozed into this thing. Well, this surprised us quite a lot. We said to Louis, “You have had the papers for a week. I asked you to come here.” He then burst into the most violent language, got up, collected his staff-[Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Omar] Bradley, there was an admiral, various other people there-and he said he wasn’t going to be bullied around by subordinate people and swept out of the room. This left us sitting in a rather aghast sort of way. General Burns had remained behind. General Burns put his head on his hand on the table, and started to weep . . . .
Secretary of State Dean Acheson
General [James] Burns [the Defense Department liaison to the Department of State] collapsed with his head on the desk and cried, “Here I have done my best. I’ve never been spoken to in my life this way. I think I should kill him [Defense Secretary Louis Johnson], but I can’t do that.”
Secretary of State Dean Acheson
I damn near killed him [Defense Secretary Louis Johnson].
President Harry S. Truman
So we said [to the distraught Defense Department liaison, General James Burns], “Oh, don’t feel so badly. This is-it has happened to us before.” I was then summoned into my office, and [Secretary of Defense] Louis [Johnson] was there, and Louis started to tell me that he had been insulted, this was an outrageous thing. I told him that I had done the best I possibly could about it, whereupon he stormed out of the building. . . . [Shortly thereafter] I had a call from the President. He said he had heard about this; he was absolutely outraged by this thing; that I was to go on exactly as I had been doing, . . . and if this thing became impossible to report to him. . . . This whole period of NSC 68 came from the fall of 1949 to the spring of 1950. Now, in the meantime, what was happening in the United States? A whole lot of things were happening. You were beginning to have the various degrees of boil in the political kettle in the United States, and this was a very interesting and, to me-I can’t explain it, but I know what the phenomena were-but there were periods when the whole political thing boiled up to a high degree, and then it seemed to subside, and then for no particular reason it would boil again. . . . In the beginning of 1950, . . . the whole China business came to a colossal performance. We were right in the middle of the Republican drive . . . [attacking the Truman administration for the “loss” to the Communists of mainland] China by January 1950. By February 1950 [Senator Joseph] McCarthy had gotten started on the attack on the State Department [for allegedly harboring communists]. Sometime in that month he described me as a diplomat in striped pants with a phony British accent . . . . In March [Senator Robert] Taft went to Maine and joined in this attack in a speech with which he said that the whole State Department was corrupt from beginning to end. It was in January that I made the Hiss statement [declaring “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss,” the former State Department official who had just been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union], which absolutely took the roof off of everything.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson
Mr. [John] Hickerson [Assistant Secretary of State for United Nations Affairs] has shown me the draft of proposed [U.N.] Security Council resolution requesting U.S. and other members to make forces and other assistance available to a unified command under the United States and requesting the United States to designate the commander of such forces. I assume that General [Douglas] MacArthur would be designated. In view of the extreme delicacy of the present situation; the importance of preventing the Korean fighting from developing into a world war; the importance of maintaining the confidence of the other members of the Security Council that their resolutions will be scrupulously complied with; and in view of the factors that you and I discussed with the President, I suggest the President might want to emphasize by personal message to General MacArthur the delicate nature of the responsibilities which he will be carrying, not only on behalf of the United States but on behalf of the United Nations, and the importance of instructing his staff to comply scrupulously with political and military limitations and instructions which may be sent, the reasons for which may not always be immediately apparent but which will often have behind them political considerations of gravity.
Special Consultant to the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
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