Col. McCormick's Tribune blamed FDR and Truman for events leading to outbreak Korean War 75 years ago

Chicago Tribune

6 hours ago

The United States was caught by surprise when heavily-armed North Korean troops and tanks poured into South Korea on June 25, 1950. But the Chicago Tribune had predicted America's enemies would pull just such a trick.
Hastily flying back to Washington from his Missouri home, President Harry Truman acknowledged the situation was serious, adding he couldn't say more, 'Until I have all the facts.'
The Tribune felt it already had the facts in hand. Its editor, Col. Robert R. McCormick, had long waged a verbal war against Josef Stalin's Communism and President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. To McCormick, they were different sides of the same coin. And President Harry Truman was FDR's vice president, a theme the Tribune rarely failed to mention as the Truman administration debated the appropriate response to the aggression by North Korea, which was backed by the Soviet Union and China.
On June 27, Walter Trohan, the Tribune's Washington bureau chief, reported: 'American involvement in war appeared unlikely tonight as the fall of South Korea to communist invaders from North Korea appeared imminent.'
Then the South Korean's resistance stiffened, giving the Tribune another shot at second-guessing the administration's strategy.
'Mr. Truman and the legatees of the Roosevelt policy now talk bitterly of the insatiable ambitions and the manifold betrayals of the Russian communist enemy they once heralded as a great ;democracy',' a Tribune editorial proclaimed under a July 2, 1950 headline: 'The Bill For Ten Years Of Madness.'
Seventy-five years later, some of the Tribune's criticisms seem petty. But taken as a whole, they make a useful point about history. It doesn't occur in the discreet chapters of a textbook. It's like waves hitting a beach on a windy day. The first rolls back and combines with the next one, and that one with the third.
In 1950, Col. McCormick and President Truman were buffeted by different combinations of waves breaking and backwashing.
More than 30 years earlier, responding to President Woodrow Wilson's pitch of World War I as a crusade to save democracy, McCormick enlisted in the Army and commanded a company of volunteers he recruited.
He was disillusioned when afterward England and France grabbed Germany's colonies instead of freeing them. Henceforth McCormick considered 'internationalism' a synonym for naivety and deception. The director of the CIA left Truman vulnerable to McCormick and the Tribune's criticism by telling a U.S. Senate committee his agents had known that North Korea was strong enough to invade, but said, 'the agency could not predict a timetable.'
That fit nicely into memories of America being pulled into World War II by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, nine years earlier. In 1937, FDR had announced in a speech in Chicago: 'We are determined to keep out of war, yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement,' he said. The Tribune heard that as a confession of weakness. An invitation to the Japanese to help themselves to America's Pacific islands empire.
From the perspective of 1950, it seemed a harbinger of Secretary of State Dean Acheson's announcement that, 'our defense line in the Pacific did not include Korea and Formosa.' That statement was the 'invitation for the North Korean Reds to move south,' a Tribune editorial on Oct. 2, 1950, concluded.
Criticism of Truman's administration was further stoked in February 1950, when Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy said he had a list of 205 'known communists' in the State Department. A Senate committee said there were none, to which the Tribune in an editorial on July 19 responded: 'What we have had in the congressional investigation of the Pearl Harbor disaster we are now given again — a large bucket of whitewash.'
Truman had previously dismissed the Alger Hiss scandal as a cheap-shot 'red herring,' the Tribune recalled. 'The herring is a little higher now, and Hiss, convicted as a perjurer-spy, is under sentence of five years and has been disbarred.'
A Harvard Law School graduate, Hiss was the secretary general during the planning for the 1945 San Francisco assembly that founded the United Nations. His was accused over the years on several fronts of being a Communist. He denied those charges but ultimately was convicted of perjury.
Despite their vitriol, the Tribune' editorials accurately reflect the Korean War's origins in World War II. The U.S. had the atomic bomb, but until the first bomb was tested, the government couldn't be sure it would work.
For a Plan B to bring the war in the Pacific to a conclusion, the U.S. wanted to enlist the Russians, who had stayed out of the battle with Japan, being fully occupied with repelling the Nazis' invasion. With the Germans defeated, Russia declared war on Japan on Aug. 8, 1945.
Korea was then a Japanese colony. Having helped to defeat Japan, the Russians wanted a share of the spoils. Korea was temporarily divided at the 38th Parallel, pending a referendum that never happened. Instead, the northern half became the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a Soviet satellite. The southern half became the Republic of Korea, an American dependency.
'Mr. Roosevelt neither knew nor cared what he intended to accomplish in WWII,' the Tribune wrote on Aug. 6. 'Mr. Truman hastily improvised a war, in which we started with two strikes on us. What a mess!'
The year before the two Koreas went to war, the Chinese Communist Mao Zedong defeated his rival, Chiang Kai-shek, who fled to Formosa — the island the Acheson initially said we wouldn't, then said we would, defend. 'Mr. Truman has reversed himself at the price of a war,' the Tribune concluded.
The whole story was more complicated. During World War II, the U.S. had brokered a truce between Chiang and Mao. The objective was to put Chinese troops into the battle against the Japanese that otherwise would fight each other, or sit out the war.
The result was that Mao's followers could project themselves as China's best shot at a better future. Chang's regime was famed for corruption. The Tribune simplified that into: 'Acheson has presided over the delivery of China to Stalin as a Soviet satellite.'
Communist China and North Korea shared a border and an ideology. So a cloud hung over discussions of the Korean situation in news rooms and Pentagon offices: If the U.S. backed South Korea, would China respond?
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a World War II hero, said there was no chance the Chinese would intervene. MacArthur was far from infallible. His command was the Far East at the dawn of the U.S. entry into World War II, and the military's failure to spread out U.S. airplanes and ships clustered at Pearl Harbor led to a devastating defeat.
So the Tribune inverted the question when Truman announced: 'I have ordered United States air and sea forces to give the Korean government and troops cover.'
'What does he intend to do if the air cover and support prove inadequate?' the Tribune asked. 'He doesn't say.'
But an answer was forthcoming. On June 27, 1950, Truman said the U.S. was undertaking a 'police action' in Korea, and even a war by another name needs soldiers to wage it.
On July 4, a Tribune headline proclaimed: 'U.S. Troops Go Into Battle.'