The Consequences

From the moment he proclaimed U.S. air & sea support for the reeling Koreans, Harry Truman had seen the next fateful decision marching toward him in seven-league infantry boots. At midweek he ordered the National Security Council into secret session to size up U.S. troop positions in the Far East. Before the council lay Douglas MacArthur's report that the U.S. doughfoot would have to come and come fast to South Korea if the high-sounding words of 24 hours before were to have any meaning.

It was a problem the NSC had wrestled with before. As long ago as last January, the policymakers had drawn the broad outlines of U.S. action in case of Korean invasion: the quick recourse to the United Nations Security Council and the dispatch of arms aid (which the President had set in motion soon after the Communists began rolling). But in its blackboard arguments, NSC had never been able to make up its mind about sending U.S. troops. Infantryman Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had held that Korea wasn't worth it from the standpoint of pure military strategy; the State Department--backed by the Navy--had said it very well might be, for reasons of U.S. prestige in Asia and U.S. leadership in the world.

The Troops March. Now the argument was ancient history. Politics, strategy and the prestige of the democratic world were so tightly intertwined in Korea that no one could separate them, and nobody tried. After a brisk, businesslike session, the members locked up their papers, snapped their briefcases and carried their report off to Harry Truman.

Two mornings later, Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas was called at home at 8 o'clock by a summons to an11 a.m. White House conference. In the Cabinet room he found the same gathering of congressional leaders and Cabinet members who had listened to the President's statement early in the week. They waited for 20 minutes before Harry Truman came in, took a seat next to fellow Missourian Dewey Short, and asked General Bradley to recite the bad news from Korea. When Bradley had finished, the President slowly read off the text of his decision to throw U.S. troops into the battle, to allow the Air Force to bomb "specific military targets" in Communist North Korea, and to order the Navy to blockade the entire Korean coast.

Brisk Show. Later that day 66-year-old Harry Truman seemed to walk with a weary man's heavy tread. He wasn't usually one to worry about decisions once made, he confided to the New York Herald Tribune's Carl Levin, but on the Korean affair he couldn't help worrying about the inevitable consequences. That worry creased his face even while he put himself through a brisk show of business-as-usual, talking California politics with Jimmy Roosevelt, laying a cornerstone in the blazing Washington heat, addressing the Boy Scouts at Valley Forge. At week's end, with a more buoyant step, he strode up the gangway of the Presidential Yacht Williamsburg at Philadelphia, to join daughter Margaret on a quick, quiet cruise to Washington. He had made the big decisions; the next steps would come from Tokyo, Korea--and Moscow.

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