This year, 2025, marks the 75th anniversary of the Korean conflict. When communist North Korean forces invaded their southern neighbor on June 25, 1950, Dwight D. Eisenhower was serving as president of Columbia University, following a spectacular career in World War II and later as the Army’s Chief of Staff. Although totally outside of the military’s chain of command, he felt compelled to consult with virtually every American national security leader. Among them was President Harry S. Truman, upon whom he urged “Speed & strength” in reacting to the challenge. In a private diary entry describing the meeting, Ike added that he “encountered good intentions” but was unsure whether he “met full comprehension” (July 6, 1950). Concerned that the assault on South Korea might be merely the first blow in a general war with the Soviet Union and communist Chinese, Eisenhower felt that “an appeal to force cannot, by its nature, be a partial one. . .. Do everything possible under the law to get going. . .. We must study every angle to be prepared for whatever may happen—even if it finally comes to use of [the] A-bomb (which God forbid.)” (Eisenhower, diary, June 30, 1950.)
There was one major problem with Eisenhower’s call to mobilize the United States for war. President Truman had determined that the conflict then in the offing would be limited in scope; in a press conference he had even referred to it as a mere “police action.” Since the end of World War II, the US had—against Eisenhower’s consistent advice—steadily disarmed, even as the Cold War had grown more menacing. Moreover, such resources as America possessed were to be focused on the Soviet threat to Western Europe rather than Asia. As far back as 1947, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Eisenhower concurring, had recommended pulling American occupation troops out of the Korean Peninsula on the grounds that there was little strategic value present there.
For the rest of the summer and fall of 1950 Ike remained fretting on the sidelines. He complained to an old friend working in the Pentagon that the Army was neglecting guerrilla warfare, and that General Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief (and Gettysburg College graduate) General Charles A. Willoughby had a history of failures dating back to the 1941 Japanese attack on the Philippines: “Is it possible that he is not very alert?” (ltr., Eisenhower to Gruenther, July 11, 1950.) When New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art contemplated evacuating its art works and hiding them in the abandoned silver mines of Colorado, Eisenhower, a member of the Met’s Board, told them that doing so might be “interpreted as evidence of hysterical fear” (ltr., Eisenhower to Easby, Aug. 11, 1950). He even criticized the President as “poor H.S.T.—a fine man who, in the middle of a stormy lake, knows nothing of swimming. Yet a lot of drowning people are forced to look to him as a life guard” (Eisenhower, diary, Nov. 6, 1950).
Eisenhower’s frustration ended with the advent of winter. Spurred by the direct entry of the People’s Republic of China into the Korean War and the subsequent fears of looming worldwide disaster, Truman decided to send Ike back to Europe as NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander. There, in the overseas theater deemed most critical for the survival of the non-communist world, Eisenhower would be tasked with organizing and bolstering the forces necessary to keep the Soviet Union from conquering or dominating Western Europe. In this he would succeed. As President, in 1953, he would eventually accomplish the termination of the Korean War.
Dr. Daun van Ee is an historian and editor for the Eisenhower Papers Project at Johns Hopkins University and a Trustee of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Society. The Eisenhower Society is dedicated to promoting the memory and legacy of leadership of Dwight D. Eisenhower through educational programs, scholarships, grants, and special events. Learn more at dwightdeisenhowersociety.org.