Bloodless Coup

This get somewhat complicated. There was both a military and political failure at the early part of the Korean war, and then a political failure that brought the Chinese in (maybe, and Truman may or may not be blamed for the second failure).

First Political Failure: One of the high appointees for Truman (I think Acheson) was commenting publicly about the new Containment strategy, and explictly drew lines that said that Japan was within the sphere where we would use force, and Korea was outside it. Thus, the Soviet Union and Kim Il-Sung took that to mean that they could "reunify" all of Korea and the US wouldn't use force. Of course, it turned out we really did mean to put South Korea in our protective circle. Truman is certainly responsible for not making this clear, which likely would have prevented a war in the first place (Kim might have wanted to invade, but the USSR wasn't looking for fights at the time, and controlled the purse-strings and final decision for the war).

First Military Failure: the US military was in horrible, horrible shape in 1950. The massive downsizing of the military after World War II was over, but what remained was mostly untrained, ill-equipped, and poorly led. The one thing we did have was high morale (we'd just beaten Hitler and Tojo). Thus, we thought we'd just fly in and end the war shortly. The highly motivated and trained North Korean army kicked our asses (back to Pusan). MacArthur did his famous Inchon amphibious assault (In my opinion, the last conventional army amphibious assault of a hostile shore we'll ever see), and broke the North Korean Army, pushing them back past the original border, and deep into North Korea itself.

Second Political Failure: Here is where it starts to get tricky. MacArthur was a war-hero, and a Republican. He was beginning to toy with the idea of running for President in 1952. As he marched north in the summer of 1950, his own personal view was that Korea should be unified, and that he should do it militarily (and right now), and (most importantly) that the Chinese wouldn't interfere. Given MacArthur's hero status and political status, Truman (arguably) didn't actually have any control over him. And when I say "no control" I actually mean it. I've seen histories that argue that if Truman had ordered MacArthur to stop (remember - MacArthur was clearly winning, and looked like would win easily, and was one of the most famous war heros ever), MacArthur would have ignored him, and created a serious constitutional crisis. MacArthur thought he knew the Chinese wouldn't intervene (and there is credible evidence that MacArthur believed that if they did intervene, he would just nuke them and beat them too), and believed he had more military wisdom than the entire US Army outside of himself (MacArthur may have had the greatest ego of any public official in the 20th Century. I'm not kidding.), and figured he knew what he was doing. Plus, winning in Korea would help him win the Presidency in a year and a half. Thus, he marched on. Truman, fearing a constitutional crisis, and politically relcutant to order a winning general not to finish the job, just stayed silent. The Chinese, in fact, did intervene, and the rest is history.

So is any of this Truman's fault? Hard to say. There is additional evidence (a recent biography of Mao) that argued China was looking to intervene (wanted to fight the US so that the USSR would give them nuclear technology, military technolgy, and money; Mao didn't care if he killed millions to get what he wanted, so didn't really care if he won or lost in Korea so long as it got him what he wanted politically from the USSR), so arguably Truman can't even be blamed for getting them to jump in (they would have anyway).

Bottom line: in my opinion, Truman doesn't have as many faults as Bush for each of their respective wars.

Well yeah my point was more about that 2nd political failure you discuss. I have a hard time believing that Acheson (yeah, it was him) not mention it in that speech made any difference whatsoever to the course of events - though obviously it was a conventient reason to bash Acheson latter (and what would DC in the 40's and 50's have been without bashing Acheson?).

From what I've read on this (which was quite a lot at one point - but that was like a decade ago and my memory's hazy) Truman took a rather dangerously hands-off approach to the early months, even though he knew perfectly well that 1) MacArthur was inclined to do dangerous and provocative things, and 2) MacArthur had no great love for him or his administration (to put it REALLY mildly). Maybe the Chinese would have come into Korea regardless, but I guess my point is that Truman seemed to do surprisingly little to not look provocative and threatening to the Chinese. And since the political discourse of the time had already reached a level at which many US leaders were regularly calling for the downfall of the Chinese, well to send a charging US army right at them ...

And yeah, maybe Truman's sins (if there were any) were more sins of inaction instead of sins of action, and maybe Bush is "worse" than him, but I still find the renewed Truman love odd (at least to the degree it has anything to do with the merits of his foreign policy).

I guess I'm wondering what power Truman had to affect what MacArthur did. If (as some have argued) MacArthur would have disobeyed a direct order from Truman (MacArthur was already disobeying orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, though none were of the "stop advancing" variety), then Truman (by not giving such an order) prevented a constitutional crisis (though that inaction did result in the Chinese entering the war). In other words, the most charitable "pro-Truman" take would argue that faced with two bad choices (almost certain constutional crisis versus potential expanded war), Truman chose the best option. I'm not sure I believe this, but that's the best face on the history).

Well I don't think there's any evidence that Truman wanted to stop the troops, so the order wouldn't have come in any case.

I guess I just find it really troubling that 1)the president of the United States would keep the US military under the control of a shockingly insubordinate general and 2) that he seems to have made a terrible judgment call about China. I don't know enough about the last section of the war to be able to evaluate Truman's behavior in that time period.

And yeah, maybe he made the best moves possible given the circumstances - but I'd be reluctant to label him a "great" or "near-great" on that criteria.

And of course that's all before we even get to his stunningly mediocre Supreme Court appointments ... ;)