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CHAPTER 3 The Politics of Reannament in the Executive Branch II: NSC 68 and Reannament The purpose of NSC-68 was to so bludgeon the mind of "top government " that not only could the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried out. -Dean Acheson This was in the late spring of 1950, we, in this operation-this is the only time I suppose that I ever went regularly to the meetings of the NSC staff, but we were trying to find out through this machinery, using all the President's advisers and the departments, what was the best thing to do about our defense posture. We came, I think, to a firm judgment that our course ought to be sharply changed from what it had been. -Charles Murphy, White House Special Counsel, 1949-53 If the decision to reduce the fiscal 1951 military budget is difficult to explain in realist or statist terms, the abrupt reversal ofthat decision in the spring of 1950 is even more problematic. President Truman's decision to accept NSC 68's call for more military spending is better explained by the requirements of maintaining the political coalition supporting his administration than as a response to particular external shocks. This chapter will present evidence that this decision was made before the North Korean attack on South Korea. Since the events of 1949 were not sufficient to convince the administration to devote more resources to the national security program, it is extremely difficult to explain how such a decision could have been reached on this basis in the spring of 1950. The Korean War clearly affected the amount of money spent. However, it does not explain why President Truman accepted the need for a larger military budget before June 25, a choice that may have influenced the administration response to the North Korean attack on that day. Changes in the dominant group within the administration provide a better explanation for the acceptance of NSC 68 than changes in the international environment. 41 42 Building the Cold War Consensus "To so bludgeon the mind of 'top government'" Although the advocates of a small military budget were successful in 1949, their victory was short-lived. Nourse's disgust with the inability of the Council of Economic Advisers to agree on the fiscal 1951 budget led directly to his resignation. According to Nourse (1953, 283), when the council met with the president on August 26 to present its conflicting reports on the budget, Keyserling tried to play down the differences between the two sets of recommendations. Nourse wrote at the time that Keyserling's attitude "seems to me to completely negate any proper function of objective professional advice for a Council of Economic Advisers ." He declined to explain his differences with Keyserling and Clark to the president at the August 26 meeting but hoped instead that his memo would speak for itself. He trusted Pace and apparently preferred to rely on him to get the proper recommendations enacted as policy. "He seems quite sympathetic to the points of view which I have expressed.'" Despite his success in cutting the budget, the process disgusted and exhausted Nourse, who publicly accused the military advocates of greater spending of "trying to preserve a vested interest or gain new superiority with little evidence ofconcern as to the repercussions for military efficiency or economy , or the drain imposed on the industrial system."2 Nourse resigned on November 1, 1949, disregarding both the president's request that he stay on and the lack of any designated successor. Leon Keyserling then became the acting chairman, bringing his very different policy views into the position with him. After Nourse's departure, things began to go wrong for the advocates of a small defense budget. At a December 1conference to plan the foreign affairs sections of the president's January 1950 budget message, State Department representatives insisted on at least $1 billion in new appropriations for MDAP in fiscal1951. The Bureau of the Budget had planned to carve the fiscal 1951 MDAP budget from unexpended funds appropriated for the previous fiscal year. Both sides prepared to appeal their case to President Truman.3 Acheson spoke out publicly on behalf of the program and may have raised the subject privately with Truman. In any case, the president proposed $1.1 billion in new appropriations for MDAP in his budget message on January 9, 1950. By the time Truman agreed to the additional MDAP appropriations, however, there...

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