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As one of the reporters who knew him well noted later, McCarthy himself had no idea that his speech would prove so explosive. Otherwise, speculated reporter Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune, he would have taken along at least one of a handful of right-wing reporters who tutored him and helped him write his speeches.
The AP man in Charlestown called Yost back a little later. Was it really 205 Communists? Yost said he would check with Desmond. Yes, Desmond said, 205 was the right figure. The story moved over the AP wire on Thursday night and made the Friday papers. The circus had begun.
From Wheeling, McCarthy flew west to Denver, where he held an airport press conference and said that he would be glad to show them his list of Communists but that it was in his suit which was on the plane (The Denver Post ran a photo of McCarthy on page one that day with a cutline that said “Left Commie List In Other Bag”).
his colleague Edward Olsen of the A.P. They had read the wire stories from Wheeling and Salt Lake and knew something was up. There was a certain vagueness to McCarthy’s accusations, and they set out to pin him down.
He named four people, including Shapley, but neither Olsen nor McCulloch could tell what he was accusing them of. Were they Communists? Were they Communist sympathizers? Were they, in the rather broad phrase he was to use later that night, people who had furthered the purpose of Communism? His words were deliberately vague. (They were only the first among many to find out how hard it was to pin him down. “Talking to Joe was like putting your hands in a bowl of mush,” said George Reedy, who covered him for the United Press.) The number, McCulloch noticed, had gone from 205 to 57 to 4. Or had
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Getting thrown out of the best hotel in Reno was not easy, McCulloch thought. A few more drinks followed. No names were produced. McCulloch left that night sure that it was a con, that McCarthy did not care at all about Communists. It
was all a show, but one thing was real—the desire to be a pal. McCarthy loved the good-fellowship that being a celebrity produced, and he was, McCulloch decided, brilliant at creating an aura of instant friendship. McCarthy’s carnival-like four-year spree of accusations, charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness, and boozing ended his career in shame. McCarthyism crystallized and politicized the anxieties of a nation living in a dangerous new era. He took people who were at the worst guilty of
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China had fallen, not because the forces of history were against the old feudal regime, which was collapsing of its own weight. Rather, it was because of Soviet military and political hegemony. If events in the world were not as we wanted them, then something conspiratorial had happened.
It was a rare free shot in politics. His message was simple: The Democrats were soft on Communism. With that, he changed the nature of American politics. Our control of events was limited because sinister forces were at work against us. Democrats would spend the next thirty years proving that they were not soft on Communism, and that they would not lose a country to the Communists.
McCarthy was, in Richard Rovere’s phrase, the political speculator who found his gusher. He was perfectly positioned by dint of his own roots and his constituency: He was an Irish Catholic, who had been urged to take up the issue by an official at Georgetown University, and he had a large German-American population in his home state of Wisconsin, where much of the population accepted the world as defined by the oracle of the region—Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
criticism of McCarthy’s attacks began to grow, naturally enough in the East, John Riedl, the managing editor of the Appleton (Wisconsin) Post Crescent, said, “We don’t want a group of New Yorkers and Easterners to tell us whom we are going to send to the Senate. That is our business and it is none of theirs.”
He had a wonderful sense of the resentments that existed just beneath the surface in ordinary people, for he himself burned with those same resentments. Class distinctions were critical; he hated the social snobbery, implied or real, in men like Acheson and Hiss.
In fact, anti-Communism was peripheral. He had few names of his own: Essentially, he was being fed covertly by Hoover and the FBI. The names, by and large, tended to be fellow travelers from the thirties.
As his drinking escalated he would eat a quarter-pound stick of butter, which he claimed helped him hold his liquor. He was, said his old friend from Appleton, Ed Hart, “the town drunk in businessman’s clothes.”
After a thousand speeches and a thousand charges, the last thing in the world he could probably have recognized was a real Communist or a real spy ring. Perhaps the best epitaph for him came during the Eisenhower years, when he made his fateful and fatal attack on the United States Army, coming up in the end with one left-wing dentist who had been promoted by mistake.
The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead of bothering to stay behind to follow up.
It was news and he was news; that was all that mattered. “McCarthy was a dream story,” said Willard Edwards, of the Chicago Tribune. “I wasn’t off page one for four years.” Edwards, with his paper’s permission, helped supply names, did research for speeches, and even wrote drafts of some speeches. Rarely did reporters make McCarthy produce evidence. Rarely, in the beginning, did they challenge him.
He was particularly skillful at making charges in smaller towns, where the local AP representative would pick it up and use it and it would become news even if it was not the truth. After all, a senator had said it. He knew how to use the mechanics of the journalists’ profession against them; he knew their deadlines, when they were hungriest and needed to be fed, and when they had the least time to check out his charges.
He feared the dynamic of the Cold War would turn America into the policeman of the world, transforming it from a democracy to an imperial power, a role, he believed, for which we were ill suited.
At the beginning of the century, Korea was conquered by Japan and forced to live under a brutal occupation. At one point during the war Franklin Roosevelt spoke almost carelessly of a free and independent Korea after the war; at Yalta there was talk of a trusteeship to be administered by the Big Four.
The American Century was about to begin, but clearly no one wanted to pay for it. A certain schizophrenia was at work here: We wanted to be the policemen of the world, particularly in Asia, but we certainly did not want to get involved in messy, costly foreign wars. As Acheson once noted, the foreign policy of the United States in those years immediately after the war could be summed up in three sentences: “1. Bring the boys home; 2. Don’t be Santa Claus; 3. Don’t be pushed around.”
Drawing the line in Korea was to be one of the few things Truman and MacArthur would agree on. Almost immediately, MacArthur, as was his want, exceeded his authority by ordering the bombing of North Korean airfields. He thought of himself as a sovereign power in the Pacific; the President and Joint Chiefs had hegemony in Europe, in his mind, but not in Asia. That was his. Essentially he believed himself above the authority of his commander in chief.
At a meeting with reporters, he said, “We are not at war.” A reporter, searching for a way to describe the commitment, asked the President if it was a “police action.” The President, in a moment he would later regret, noted that yes, that was an apt description.
By early afternoon Smith gave the order to retreat, and when he did many of his soldiers ran, throwing away their weapons. Smith himself had to leave behind his dead and wounded. The Korean War had started. Unlike Vietnam in the next decade, it did not come back to America live and in color on television. The nation was not yet wired, and Korea, so distant, the names of its towns so alien, did not lend itself to radio coverage, as did the great war that had preceded it. The best reporting in Korea was done by daily journalists, who caught its remarkable drama, heroism, and pathos for a nation
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Some forty years after it had begun, there was no monument to it in Washington. Its most famous contribution to American mass culture was the movie and television series M*A*S*H, and even that was often associated in the public mind with Vietnam rather than Korea.
More than 2,400 men had been lost, either dead or missing. It was one of the worst periods in American military history; but gradually, fresh troops were pouring into the country. The quality of hardware was improving. The real question was whether this small, outmanned handful of American troops could win its fight against time before being driven into the sea. There was fear of an Asian Dunkirk. General Walton Walker, who had become commander of the Eighth Army, got edgier and edgier.
Every unit must counterattack to keep the enemy in a state of confusion and off balance. There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan, a retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight to the end. Capture by these people is worse than death itself. We will fight as a team. If some of us must die, we will die fighting together.
MacArthur was supremely confident; if the Chinese decided to enter the war, he would deal them such a crushing blow that it “would rock Asia and perhaps turn back Communism.” Modesty was never his strong point.
Truman had twice invited him to receive the appreciation of a grateful nation, but MacArthur turned him down, saying that he was too busy in Tokyo. Since a presidential request was in fact an order, both Truman and George Marshall were furious.
MacArthur’s explanation was simpler but predictably vainglorious. He could not return, he told an aide, because, “If I returned for only a few weeks, word would spread through the Pacific that the United States is abandoning the Orient.”
is a very great pity that we have to have stuffed shirts like that in key positions ... Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower and Bradley, and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.” That, of course, was before they even got to know each other.
MacArthur did come over to meet Truman’s plane, though wearing his usual open shirt and rumpled field cap. (“If he’d been a lieutenant in my outfit going around dressed like that,” Truman later noted, “I’d have busted him so fast he wouldn’t have known what happened to him.”)
Von Neumann was so talented that his colleagues joked that he was a Martian who did an exceptional job of posing as a humanoid with a heavy Hungarian accent. “It all came so easily for him and he was so far ahead of everyone else.” mused his friend Herman Goldstine, himself one of the early architects of computing, “that he was like Mozart.
Von Neumann turned to Herman Goldstine, who was with him, and said: “I just want you to know that that SOB is going to publish what I just gave him without a footnote referring to me.”
The obvious company to take the lead was IBM, an electrical business machine company. But Tom Watson, Sr., the dominant figure in the company, believed that the electronic revolution would not touch his business. He was, Tom Watson, Jr., later wrote, “like the king who sees a revolution going on in the country next door to his own, yet is astounded when his own subjects get restless. He didn’t realize that a new era had begun. IBM was the classic company with tunnel vision because of its success.”
It weighed some 65 tons, so heavy that it recalled Oppenheimer’s joke that if we needed to use the Super in war, we would have to deliver it by oxcart. It yielded some 10.4 million tons of TNT, or a force a thousand times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. Leona Marshall Libby, a witness to the explosion, wrote of it: “The fireball expanded to three miles in diameter.
EVEN AS DOUGLAS MACARTHUR promised Harry Truman that the Chinese would not enter the Korean War and that if they did, he would slaughter them, the Chinese Fourth Field Army was entering the country.
The troops had grown up in a world where the enemy always controlled the skies. Therefore they were trained not to move at all when an airplane passed overhead.
and experienced was a vast understatement. They marched (or trotted) 286 miles to their assembly point at the Yalu in eighteen days, carrying only eight to ten pounds of gear and supplies: a weapon, a grenade, eighty rounds of ammunition, perhaps a week’s supply of rice, and a tiny bit of meat and fish.
They were not expert marksmen; rather, they were trained to attack close to their enemy and unleash bursts of automatic fire, a method that demanded that they take extremely heavy casualties.
Though we did not know much about the Chinese, they knew a great deal about us. They received a pamphlet about the American troops just before the first battle began. The Americans, it said, were not to be underestimated. They were good soldiers, well equipped, and had the advantages of mobility and modern firepower in their attacks, enabling them to make lightning-quick strikes. But their weaknesses were noted as well: They did not fight well when forced to defend, and attacks at night would panic them, forcing them to leave behind their heavy equipment.
At this point, the UN troops, whose misfortune it was to be carrying out MacArthur’s last great dream of glory, were undersupplied, underclothed, underfed, and far from their base camp. As those United Nations units moved forward they began to feel a growing sense of isolation. Something ominous was in the air. In late November, a British officer was taking his first bath in weeks when word was brought to him that four men on horseback had been spotted near his brigade headquarters. He dressed and rushed over just in time to see them ride off. He knew instantly that they were Chinese, not
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It was a new kind of war. Just when the Americans thought they might have slowed the assault, more Chinese would come—like an endless human wave. A few men in an American defensive position would lay down a perfect field of fire and kill a hundred attacking Chinese.
Truman was becoming worried by the recurring reports of Chinese intervention and the hammering of the Eighth Cavalry; the JCS cabled MacArthur asking the extent of Chinese involvement. The next day MacArthur replied that he now saw Chinese intervention as a “distinct possibility,” to give covert assistance to the North Koreans.
“Every hour that this is postponed will be paid for dearly in American and other United Nations blood.... I cannot overemphasize the disastrous effect both physical and psychological that will result from the restrictions which you are imposing ...” He ended the cable with a barely concealed threat: Failure to do as he said would result in “a calamity of major proportions for which I cannot accept the responsibility without his [Truman’s] personal and direct understanding of the situation.” It was a stunning reversal on MacArthur’s part: Until then he had been saying with great disdain that
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Once in reach of the prize, MacArthur would not allow himself to be delayed or admonished. Instead he plunged northward in pursuit of a vanishing enemy and changed his plans from week to week to accelerate his advance without regard for dark hints of possible disaster.” The drive toward the Yalu began
Rifles froze and men had to piss on them to thaw them out.
“We’re still attacking and we’re going all the way to the Yalu. Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you,” he said. So much for the Fourth Field Army.
By November 28 it was clear that this was an epic disaster and that the great MacArthur had been outgeneraled by the Chinese. The question was suddenly how much of the 2nd Infantry Division and how much of the First Marines would get out alive.
In the weeks following the Chinese attack, MacArthur seemed to be offering the President only the choice between a much larger war in which he claimed he would ultimately triumph or a complete rout. The Truman administration was in many ways fighting if not for its life, at least for its legitimacy. On November 30, at a White House press conference a reporter asked Truman whether, since he had said that America would take any and all steps to meet its military obligations, that might include the atomic bomb.
