HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PRESIDENT EISENHOWER’S THREAT TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO END THE KOREAN WAR JOSEPH ENGE MH550 U.S. MILITARY HISTORY ROBERT WINTERMUTE, PH.D NORWICH UNIVERSITY NOVEMBER 11, 2012 Dwight David Eisenhower won the 1952 presidential election with a mandate to end the bloody stalemate on the Korean peninsula. The country was frustrated with over two years of conflict with no end in sight. America was bogged down in its first “limited war” and turned to the former supreme commander and national hero who led American and British forces to victory against Nazi Germany less than a decade before. Eisenhower visited the Korean front in December of 1952 as promised during his election campaign and also kept his commitment to end the fighting in Korea seven months into his presidency. Both President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles credited their use of nuclear weapons coercion to end the communist delay tactics at the negotiations at Panmunjom to bring about the July 1953 truce. This also validated their New Look approach to national defense threatening “massive retaliation” when U.S. national vital interests were at stake. Scholars have been divided in the six decades since the truce in Korea ended the war, or “police action” using the Truman administration’s euphemism. The debate and historiography centers on cynicism regarding the effectiveness of “massive retaliation” as a defense policy in general, and specifically whether President Eisenhower’s hint of considering the utilization of nuclear weapons to break the deadlock in Korea produced the truce. Some scholars assert no such nuclear threat occurred; and as David Mayers contends it was the combination of Stalin’s death in March of 1953 with the new Soviet leadership wishing to reduce tensions with the U.S. 1 to concentrate on political consolidation and economic development.1 It is also asserted China and North Korea were weary of the war and also wanted to focus on domestic economic development as their primary motivation to end the fighting in Korea. Academic divergence exists as to the nature and effectiveness of Eisenhower as president. Portrayals of President Eisenhower range from a calm, cool, collected man in charge who not only got the U.S. out of the fighting in Korea, but kept America out of any limited wars for his two terms to a hands off rather bumbling leader who was somehow lucky in his Cold War achievements. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. provides a larger context for the differing and various views of President Eisenhower and his policies writing: The reputation of commanding American presidents generally declines for a period of ten to twenty years after office or death. In the case of Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, a tone of condescension was set, at least among intellectuals, during the years of his presidency itself. The notion of a genial, indo-lent man of pied syntax and platitudinous conviction, fleeing from public policy to bridge, golf, and westerns, undoubtedly influenced the historians and political scientists who, in my father's poll of 1962, rated him twenty-second among American presidents. But in a comparable poll, published by the Chicago Tribune twenty years later, Eisenhower finished in ninth place.2 Schlesinger Jr. asserts in 1983 review of books on President Eisenhower with the availability of the president’s papers in the Eisenhower Library “destroy the once accepted portrait of the rather passive and uninterested president who allowed strong associates to run the David Mayers, “Eisenhower's Containment Policy and the Major Communist Powers, 1953-1956,” The International History Review 5, no. 1 (Feb., 1983): 62. 2 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Review of The Eisenhower Diaries, by Robert H. Ferrell; Eisenhower the President: Crucial Days: 1951-1960, by William Bragg Ewald; Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, by Stephen E. Ambrose; Richard H. Immerman; The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy, by Blanche Wiesen Cook; The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader by Fred I .Greenstein, Reviews in American History 11, no. 1 (Mar., 1983): 1–2. 1 2 country in his name.” The academic caricature of President Eisenhower has a direct bearing on the thought, purposefulness, and success of his actions and policies as they relate to his commitment to end the Korean conflict and the extent he was willing to go to make it happen. Whether atomic coercion ended the Korean War was and remains as much as a political issue as an academic one. The success of atomic coercion against the communists validates New Look and “massive retaliation.” Opponents to New Look were not just among academia who questioned the “all or nothing” posture that included Henry Kissinger among its critics, but also the U.S. Army that found itself downsized and relegated to being a tripwire force while the Air Force and Navy played lead roles in massive retaliation. Douglas Kinnard directly addressed this issue in his review of Stephen Ambrose’s book Eisenhower: The President writing: Eisenhower's greatest successes, Ambrose feels, came in foreign policy and related national defense issues: "By making peace in Korea and avoiding war thereafter . . . and by holding down, almost single handedly, the pace of the arms race, he achieved his major accomplishments" (p. 625). In a sense the praise Ambrose gives Ike for his successes in the domestic economy relate also to his efforts in foreign and national security, although the author does not develop this theme explicitly. Eisenhower's major campaign promises in 1952 were to liquidate the Korean War and balance the budget, which had a significant influence on U.S. strategic policy when those promises were implemented. His basic approach was to rely on deterrence, stressing the role of nuclear technology at the expense of land forces.3 H. W. Brands wrote in 1989 that Douglas Kinnard portrays Eisenhower as a “skilled practitioner” in matter of defense policy and Stephen Ambrose’s research showed Eisenhower’s 3 Douglas Kinnard, Review of Eisenhower: The Soldier and the President & Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, by Stephen E. Ambrose, American History 13, no. 3 (Sep.1985): 425. 3 abilities and successes in this area were “laudatory.”4 Brands notes the different views of David Alan Rosenberg and John Lewis Gaddis with Rosenberg criticizing President Eisenhower for failing to follow through on policy details and Gaddis pointing out President Eisenhower’s penchant for “deliberate obfuscation-a matter of Eisenhower talking tougher than he acted.”5 Yet, Kinnard, Ambrose, Rosenberg, and Gaddis views can be aligned when taking into account George H. Quester’s 1979 article “Was Eisenhower a Genius?” Quester’s thought provoking central assertion is that President Eisenhower was purposefully vague in his statements and played on the domestic academic perception of him as not a clear thinker to keep the communists guessing and remain unsure to what degree and under what circumstances he would be willing to implement his policy of massive retaliation. Quester affirms the popular image of Eisenhower similar to Schlesinger Jr. in writing: One should begin by sketching in broad-brush outline what passes for the normal interpretation of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President, "normal" at least among academics and other informed commentators on the development of domestic and foreign policy. "Ike" is portrayed and seen as not an intellectual, as indeed not very bright; despite his experiences as a university president, the waggish summary of his years at Columbia was that his closest faculty colleague had been Lou Little, the football coach. Eisenhower, moreover, is portrayed as altogether lacking in energy for the presidency, as basically lazy, as spending too many days on vacations away from Washington playing golf, and as investing too few hours of too few days on the pressing business of government.6 H.W. Brands, “The Age of Vulnerability: Eisenhower and the National Insecurity State,” The American Historical Review 94, no. 4 (Oct., 1989): 964. 5 Ibid. 6 George H. Quester, “Was Eisenhower a Genius?,” International Security 4, no. 2 (Autumn, 1979): 159. 4 4 Quester’s central question is could it be that he (President Eisenhower) blundered into being a successful President?7 Quester’s blunder question directly relates to Eisenhower’s success at ending the fighting in Korea. Either President Eisenhower was very lucky with the death of Stalin in March of 1953 combined with questionable assertion of conflict fatigue among the communists who previously showed no real interest in ending the attrition of U.N. forces in Korea or Eisenhower hit the right buttons at the right time by making it known the United States would not tolerate an indefinite ground war and was willing to escalate it to even the conceivable option of using nuclear weapons to end it. Quester admits in using induction and indirection that Eisenhower’s “odds of a random walk into success are not so great.”8 Elucidating this point, Quester wrote: With that set of goals, Eisenhower must then be credited with having been enormously successful for his term of office. Either he was altogether lucky or he was secretly much smarter than we all assumed about how one relates the opportunities of domestic and foreign policy to one's goals. It will not do for us to contend that Eisenhower was unintelligent simply because we do not share or approve of his goals. A finding of lack of intelligence would rather have to be based on evidence that he did not succeed in serving his goals. Quester sets historical analysis on firm ground by defining the stated intentions of President Eisenhower, his actions, and his outcomes. Quester further refutes that President Eisenhower was a non-engaged president letting Dulles make the decisions writing the president made the crucial decisions and not Dulles.9 According to Quester, obfuscation and lack of specificity, or details by Rosenberg and “talking tougher than actions” by Gaddis, were required 7 Ibid, 169. Ibid. 9 Ibid, 164. 8 5 to make massive retaliation viable. Clarity and specificity under President Truman with the January 1950 speech by Secretary of State Dean Acheson not including South Korea as within America’s defensive perimeter has been cited as a motivation for North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in June of 1950 as North Korea may have interpreted the United States was not willing to defend South Korea. The election of a new president experienced as a supreme commander in war, dedicated to ending the Korean conflict, reducing the economic drain of the military to bolster American economic strength for a long-term Cold War struggle, to effect containment of communism by reliance on massive retaliation, and willing to utilize American nuclear assets, at least in statement, to extricate the country out of an unwinnable war of attrition by design or luck effected it into reality by July of 1953. Quester asserts deception on the part of President Eisenhower was the key ingredient. If Acheson’s clarity proved to have invited North Korea’s aggression, then perhaps Eisenhower’s lack of clarity contributed to communist rethinking of what they called the “correlation of forces,” but not in their direction. Quester wrote, “…we might be led to the conclusion that Ike was indeed a genius of the first order… that being smart (in politics) may require pretending not to be smart… Deception is certainly an important part of the political contest. Yet how then does one mislead adversaries about what one is actually thinking? It is not always easy to convince others that you are smarter than you are; by contrast, it is much easier to pretend to be more ignorant.”10 Schlesinger Jr. attributes Blanche Wiesen Cook with a similar perspective of President Eisenhower as “the most 10 Ibid, 160. 6 undervalued . . . statesman of the twentieth century." His commitment to peace, she has latterly decided, was "limited to nuclear detente and the prevention of large-scale international warfare."11 Schlesinger Jr. concludes in his review, “The Eisenhower papers, as used in these and other books, unquestionably alter the old picture. We may stipulate at once that Eisenhower showed much more energy, interest, self-confidence, purpose, cunning, and command than many of us supposed in the 1950s.” William B. Pickett defined the different interpretations of President Eisenhower’s use of military force into two academic schools, revisionists and post-revisionists with the revisionists viewing President Eisenhower as a man of enormous skill, energy, and stature and the postrevisionists perspective of a flawed man who did not live up to his potential of securing longterm peace during the Cold War.12 Philip West in his review of books on President Eisenhower and the Korean War contends international conflicts naturally pass through academic phases from a “heroic phase” to a “skepticism phase.”13 Yet, West’s explanation of these phases does not address the initial skepticism from academia regarding the defense policies of Eisenhower and Dulles. Rosemary J. Foot, Edward Friedman, and David Mayers are leading critics of the effectiveness of President Eisenhower’s mixture of foreign policy and threat or use of force to 11 Schlesinger Jr., 4. William B. Pickett, Review of Eisenhower: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century, by Douglas Kinnard & General Eisenhower: Ideology and Discourse, by Ira Chernus, The Journal of Military History 67, no. 2 (Apr., 2003): 623. 13 Philip West, Review of Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, by Bruce Cummings; Korea: The Untold Story of the War, by Joseph C. Goulden; The Korean War, by Max Hastings; The Korean War: An Oral History, by Donald Knox; The Korean War: Uncertain Victory, by Donald Knox; The Origins of the Korean War, by Peter Lowe, The American Historical Review 94, no. 1 (Feb., 1989): 81. 12 7 contain or coerce communist aggression. Foot discounts the Eisenhower’s nuclear threat as being a factor in bringing about the July 1953 truce in Korea in that Eisenhower and Dulles exaggerated its success.14 Foot cites the readiness of the Chinese and North Koreans to settle the matter by the spring and summer of 1953, but reservedly admits “although atomic coercion probably had some influence on ending the conflict, it did not play the dominant role that Eisenhower and Dulles ascribed to it.”15 Foot’s use of the word “sinister” in describing the escalation of U.N. air attacks against North Korea’s dams and irrigation channels to coerce the truce talks reveals a degree of lack of objectivity.16 Foot raises a fundamental problem in the historical determination of whether Eisenhower’s threat of nuclear weapons motivated the communists to agree to a ceasefire by quoting Robert J. Art who wrote, “it can never be clear whether one's actions were crucial to, or irrelevant to, why another state chose not to do something.”17 Foot also quotes Edward C. Keefer to portray the Eisenhower administration’s Korean policy as “thrashing about” to convey its lacked direction or focused purpose.18 Edward Friedman not only discounts the nuclear threat played a role in communist motivations, but contends it delayed the truce and Dulles later assertions were no more than fable and myth to support the broader policy of massive retaliation.19 Friedman’s tone and word choices convey his lack of objectivity too with multiple uses of the term “fable,” referring to Dulles’ assertion of the nuclear threat provided the necessary breakthrough at the truce talks as Rosemary J. Foot, “Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean Conflict,” International Security 13, no. 3 (Winter, 1988-1989): 95, 101. 15 Ibid, 95. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid, 94–95. 19 Edward Friedman, “Nuclear Blackmail and the End of the Korean War,” Modern China 1, no. 1 (Jan., 1975): 75, 80. 14 8 “bragging,” and was nothing more than a “tale.” Friedman writes Dulles’ nuclear threat breakthrough was nothing more than a brag that “became part of elite American folk culture.”20 Both Foot and Friedman assert that the definite and clear contentions of Eisenhower, Dulles, and Nixon were after the fact political posturing for domestic consumption.21 Friedman attributes the change of Chinese and North Korean willingness to accept a truce on the death of Stalin who was willing to support China’s brinkmanship and the new Soviet leadership’s unwillingness to support China against U.S. escalation.22 Friedman overreaches in his contention “Dulles’ fable should be buried” by quoting the official history of the United States Army in the Korean War since 1951 that states the Korean War would not likely be broadened to war with the China mainland or the Soviet Union.23 Given Roger Dingman chronicles three instances where President Truman considered using nuclear weapons during the Korean War against potential Chinese and Soviet targets, Friedman’s weak use of the official U.S. Army history in this instance is not convincing.24 Barton J. Bernstein makes it clear both Truman and Eisenhower were very serious in their contemplation of using nuclear weapons in Korea.25 Bernstein wrote: Within seven months of entering the White House, after using nuclear threats and escalating conventional bombing, Eisenhower ended the war and forced the obstreperous Syngman Rhee, President of the Republic of Korea, to accept the armistice. 20 Ibid, 76. Friedman, 76, 79. 22 Friedman, 87. 23 Ibid, 88. 24 Roger Dingman, “Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War,” International Security 13, no. 3 (Winter, 19881989): 55–60, 67, 74. 25 Barton J. Bernstein, “New Light on the Korean War,” The International History Review 3, no. 2 (Apr., 1981): 257, 261–263, 271–273. 21 9 The recently declassified minutes of the meeting at which Kennan spoke, a session of the National Security Council Consultants on 29 June, reveal some unsettling information. Advisors were talking about bombing Manchuria if China entered the war, the possible use of the A-Bomb in future situations and that it might not be a bad time for war with Russia. '[If] we caught Chinese Communists in South Korea we could ... even bomb in Manchuria', Kennan concluded in the words of the minutes.26 Bernstein confirms Eisenhower made the nuclear threat through Dulles’ visit to India to be passed on to China writing: In May, the administration put more pressure on the Communists to agree to an armistice and yield on the last sticking point, voluntary repatriation of prisoners of war. The government sent atomic cannon to Okinawa. And in late May, while visiting India, Dulles told the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, that 'if no armistice occurred, hostilities might become more intense.'27 While there is wide disagreement in American historiography regarding the threat and success of Eisenhower’s nuclear threat to end the Korean War, there is general agreement and acceptance in South Korea that this was the case. The Korean Institute of Military History gives full credit to the nuclear threat writing: Not until "Marshall [Dwight D.] Eisenhower" became president in January 1953 did Washington end its policy of appeasement. Predictably the U.S. air power strategy receives praise, as does Eisenhower's threat to utilize atomic weapons against the Communists, which "performed a decisive role in leading to signing the armistice"28 26 Ibid, 257. Ibid, 276. 28 James I. Matray, Review of The Korean War, by The Korea Institute of Military History, The Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 2 (May, 2003): 644. 27 10 South Korea’s more militant stand and historical perception are understandable given its experiences during and since the Korean War with North Korea. Donald W. Boose summed up well the central problem in determining in hindsight what factors played into the final communist acceptance of a truce in July of 1953. Boose writes: Eisenhower also attempted to transmit veiled nuclear threats through India and other countries. It is unclear what combination of UNC concessions, Soviet pressure, steppedup air attacks, and nuclear threats persuaded the Chinese and North Koreans to accept the UNC position, but on 4 June General Nam II declared, "We basically agree to the new proposal which your side put forward on 25 May"29 If the nuclear threat was successful, it is unlikely the Chinese, North Koreans, or Soviet Union leaders would ever publicly admit or document it. The United States had a nuclear advantage despite Soviet atomic bomb development to deliver them. It remains unclear, as Boose wrote, as to what persuaded and motivated China and North Korea to end the three-year war. What is clear is that Eisenhower was determined to get the United States out of a costly and bloody limited war and prevent any recurrence as the academic debate continues whether the nuclear threat was a deciding factor to obtain and keep peace. Donald W. Boose, “Fighting while Talking: The Korean War Truce Talks,” OAH Magazine of History 14, no. 3, The Korean War (Spring, 2000): 27. 29 11 WORKS CITED Bernstein, Barton J. “New Light on the Korean War.” The International History Review 3, no. 2 (Apr., 1981): 256-277. Brands, H.W. “The Age of Vulnerability: Eisenhower and the National Insecurity State.” The American Historical Review 94, no. 4 (Oct., 1989): 963-989. Boose, Donald W. Jr. “Fighting while Talking: The Korean War Truce Talks.” OAH Magazine of History 14, no. 3, The Korean War (Spring, 2000): 25-29 Linn, Brian McAllister. Dingman, Roger. “Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War.” International Security 13, no. 3 (Winter, 1988-1989): 50-91. Foot, Rosemary J. “Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean Conflict.” International Security 13, no. 3 (Winter, 1988-1989): 92-112. Friedman, Edward. “Nuclear Blackmail and the End of the Korean War.” Modern China 1, no. 1 (Jan., 1975): 75-91. Kinnard, Douglas. Review of Eisenhower: The Soldier and the President & Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952, by Stephen E. Ambrose. American History 13, no. 3 (Sep. 1985): 421-427. Matray, James I. Review of The Korean War, by The Korea Institute of Military History. The Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 2 (May, 2003): 643-645. Mayers, David. “Eisenhower's Containment Policy and the Major Communist Powers, 19531956.” The International History Review 5, no. 1 (Feb., 1983): 59-83. Pickett, William B. Review of Eisenhower: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century, by Douglas Kinnard & General Eisenhower: Ideology and Discourse, by Ira Chernus. The Journal of Military History 67, no. 2 (Apr., 2003): 623-625. Quester, George H. “Was Eisenhower a Genius?” International Security 4,no. 2 (Autumn, 1979): 159-179. Saunders, Richard M. “Military Force in the Foreign Policy of the Eisenhower Presidency.” Political Science Quarterly 100, no. 1 (Spring, 1985): 97-116. 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