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Ending the War without Truman or MacArthur 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 There [is] no easy way out of the Korean war. . . . The only program I could offer is far from a satisfactory solution. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 19521 Harry Truman could retain political viability despite dismissing Douglas MacArthur as long as he could hold out credible hope that he was about to end the war. That claim lost plausibility once the president insisted that prisoners of war get to choose their place of repatriation, a symbolic victory despite deadlock on the battlefield. Several thousand communist soldiers indicated they would go to Taiwan, something Beijing would not abide because denied recognition as the one and only government of China. The fighting therefore continued, a fatal blow to an administration not resorting to military escalation to break the impasse. Stalemate, politically, can be worse than defeat because it keeps the conflict current when the nation holds its next election. The party in office, unlike the opposition, cannot say it’s time for a change. Therefore the most important political contest in 1952 was for the Republican presidential nomination , which MacArthur lost to Dwight Eisenhower on personality as much as policy. Now Eisenhower would have to end the war on acceptable terms, what eluded Truman. The new president made motions toward executing a MacArthur-like strategy of attacking China. Joseph Stalin’s death then auspiciously broke the diplomatic logjam. This rang down the curtain on the Korean War, except for debates about what actually caused the enemy concession on POWs and how to contain communist expansion in the Far East. Eisenhower 236 ✪ Truman and MacArthur chose to emphasize the impact of threats to use atomic weapons, a handy claim when cutting Truman’s military spending. Matt Ridgway, now army chief of staff, protested these reductions in the name of preventing a return to the state of unpreparedness afflicting ground forces in June 1950. Conflict in Vietnam was already on the horizon, but Eisenhower dismissed the hero of Korea with more alacrity than Truman handled MacArthur. Peace Talks and Prisoners of War Establish the principle that the treatment of POWs, after their transfer to places of internment, shall be directed toward their exploitation, training , and use for psychological warfare purposes. NSC-81/1, 9 September 19502 Boundary lines between the antagonists were troublesome but not grounds to delay the armistice until July 1953. The prospective point of cease-fire reflected military facts and emplacements, not policy decisions by heads of state. As of June 1951, it did not lie precisely at the 38th parallel, which separated North and South Korea when the war began. Syngman Rhee, the leader of the South, fervently wanted to regain Kaesong, the ancient capital of his nation situated two miles below the parallel west of Seoul. It was still in enemy hands as the United Nations dug its own defensive positions on the east side of the peninsula twenty-five miles north of the prewar borderline. Talk could not resolve the issue, so the line of contact dictated the terms both sides accepted by November 1951: retention of occupied territory per the ancient Latin principle of uti possidetis: “if you are in possession.”3 Other issues were also compromised because neither side had the power or the will to dictate terms. Nor were they willing to assume the international opprobrium of rejecting a reasonable solution to a war the world community wanted to conclude. Mutual agreement was reached about rotating and replacing army units during armistice negotiations as well as building jet airfields. Even the status of Taiwan, a major problem in Sino-American relations, temporarily went into eclipse, although present from the onset of the war. A week after Kim Il-sung crossed the 38th Parallel in June 1950, Chou En-lai told the Soviet ambassador about the “negative” impact of the operation on Chinese plans to liberate the island in question. In August, he protested to the United Nations “direct armed aggression on the territory of China,” meaning the dispatch of the U.S. Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait. That November, Mao thought he could force this disengagement by decisively beating America north of Pyongyang. Frostbite and firepower decimated his gloveless infantry wearing tennis shoes better suited for storming the Kuomintang redoubt. Mao thereby lost his best opportunity to conquer “the renegade province.”4 Ending the War without Truman or MacArthur ✪ 237 In June 1951, Mao told Kim that “the...

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