Truman and Korea

by Pierpaoli, Paul G.

• ISBN13: 9780826212061
• ISBN10: 0826212069
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of Missouri Pr

Summary

Detailing for the first time the story of America's homefront during the Korean War,Truman and Koreafills an important gap in the historical scholarship of the postwar era. Paul Pierpaoli analyzes the political, economic, social, and international ramifications of America's first war of Soviet containment, never losing sight of the larger context of the cold war. He focuses on how and why the Truman administration undertook a bloody, inconclusive war on the Korean peninsula while permanently placing the nation on a war footing. Truman and Koreailluminates the importance of the Korean conflict as a critical turning point in the cold war by examining both the immediate and the long-term domestic and foreign policy effects of the conflict. Pierpaoli addresses such important topics as presidential war powers and debates concerning the Defense Production Act; the inner workings of the many war mobilization agencies; the operations and politics of nationwide price and wage controls; questions concerning cold war tax policies and fiscal and monetary policies; and the evolution of national security policy. Pierpaoli shows that President Truman's decision to intervene in the Korean War quickly became subsumed by larger cold war concerns. By the autumn of 1950 the Korean mobilization program had become the nation's de facto cold war preparedness program, which would come to span nearly forty years and eight presidential administrations. After 1950 the cold war not only continued to significantly shape political and ideological discourse in the United States but also began to reshape aggregate economic policy. By doing so, it altered the nation's industrial and economic contours, giving birth to the concept of an institutionalized "national security state," which in turn spawned the cold war military-industrial-scientific complex. Based upon extensive research in the papers and official presidential files of Harry S. Truman, as well as many manuscript collections and records of wartime and government agencies,Truman and Koreaoffers a new perspective on the Korean War era and its inextricable ties to broader cold war decision making.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix	(2)
Abbreviations	xi
Introduction	1	(15)
I. NSC-68 and the Outbreak of the Korean War Toward a Piecemeal Mobilization, April-November 1950	16	(33)
II. "An Entirely New War" The Chinese Intervention and the Institutionalization of Rearmament, December-January 1951	49	(33)
III. Labor's Cold Shoulder The Price and Wage Freeze and a Crisis-Filled Spring, February-May 1951	82	(37)
IV. The Politics of Rearmament Guns or Butter or Guns and Butter? June-December 1951	119	(41)
V. Crises of Confidence The Steel Crisis, Congressional Intransigence, and the Evolution of National Security, January-June 1952	160	(35)
VI. Toward a Tenuous Normalcy Decontrol and the General's Arrival, July 1952-February 1953	195	(29)
Conclusion	224	(13)
Bibliography	237	(18)
Index	255