Truman made up his mind from the start: He would contest the Communists in Korea. “We are going to fight,” he told his daughter, Margaret. “By God I am not going to let them have it,” he told another aide. Almost all his top aides felt the same way: This was the first chance to show that they had learned the lessons of Munich. Probably no one reflected the mood of the national security-military complex better than Omar Bradley, a man not given to hasty rhetoric. Bradley termed the invasion a “moral outrage.” If we gave in, he said, it would be appeasement. We had to draw the line somewhere,
...more
