Truman, Congress, and Korea: The Politics of America’s First Undeclared War by Larry Blomstedt (review)

“I am not a member of any organized political party,” humorist Will Rogers once said. “I am a Democrat.” Larry Blomstedt provides fresh evidence validating his observation, describing how during the Korean War “[President Harry S.] Truman and the congressional Democrats failed each other in important ways” (p. 221). But he exaggerates when he claims to have written “the most detailed political history to date of the Korean War during the Truman administration” (p. xv). Steven Casey’s Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950–1953 (2008) remains the authoritative account. Blomstedt, however, has made a welcome contribution to the literature on the U.S. domestic side of the Korean conflict, complementing two older but still excellent works on the Republican Party—Ronald J. Caridi’s The Korean War and American Politics: The Republican Party as a Case Study (1968) and David R. Kepley’s The Collapse of the Middle Way: Senate Republicans and the Bipartisan Foreign Policy, 1948–1952 (1988). Blomstedt presents convincing evidence to substantiate his principal assertion “that the congressional Democrats are to blame for failing to advise their president to get the legislature’s endorsement before committing troops to Korea” (p. xiv).

Blomstedt advances several significant conclusions about the politics of the Korean War in the United States, some original and others derivative. Few readers, for example, will be unaware of how “Korea began a trend of American presidents deploying significant numbers of troops overseas without obtaining a declaration of war from Congress” (p. xiii). Similarly, many historians have identified Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg’s death on 18 April 1951 as marking the end of a postwar bipartisan U.S. foreign policy. Without saying so, Blomstedt presents much evidence for the conclusion that genuine bipartisanship never existed during the Truman presidency. However, he argues insightfully that the Republican struggle with the president over foreign policy was not institutional but “personal and political” (p. 222), adding that the dispute did not prevent Truman from running the war as he chose. Arguably Blomstedt’s most daring contention holds that conventional wisdom exaggerates Joseph McCarthy’s political influence. Blomstedt contends that McCarthy in fact had little impact on Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea or the elections of 1950 and 1952. More indistinct is Blomstedt’s alleged lesson of the Korean War “that a president and his or her party in Congress must act as a critical check and balance against each other” (p. 221).

A chapter-length introduction sets the political stage before the Korean War, emphasizing how African American civil rights divided the Democratic Party and Republican anger over the “loss of China” precluded a bipartisan policy toward Asia. Blomstedt then covers familiar ground in his description of Truman’s response to North Korea’s invasion. He holds Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas responsible for allowing Truman to ignore the implicit legal requirement to obtain congressional approval before committing forces to United Nations (UN) missions. Setbacks in Korea and Republican attacks on Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson further divided the Democratic Party, culminating in its midterm election losses in November 1950. Until then, Truman merely had kept Republicans informed about his wartime decisions, but Chinese intervention forced him “to actually practice the gospel of bipartisan foreign policy making” (p. 94). Unity behind Truman’s national emergency declaration “marked the peak of bipartisan cooperation during the war” (p. 108), but thereafter the “great debate” and “[General Douglas] MacArthur’s removal killed any meaningful possibility of the two parties presenting a unified front on foreign affairs” (p. 176). Republicans then formed an alliance with Southern Democrats against Truman, rejecting most of his revisions in the Defense Production Act. After a long rehash of the steel mills seizure dispute, Blomstedt finishes with a description of how a divided Democratic Party contributed to a Republican landslide in the 1952 election.

A strength...