gan under Truman. Which raises the question of how would Harry S Truman, who created the Cold War policy, would have dealt with its most disasterous consequences. It is tempting to draw an analogy between Korea and Vietnam, and between Truman and Nixon. Korea and Vietnam were both Asian countries, divided rather artificially between Communist norths and pro Western souths, along respectively the seventeenth and the thirty seventh parallels. In both cases, the Communist regime in the north was determined to forcibly unify the country under its own rule, and the U.S. committed itself to upholding the regime in the south, supporting it with massive intervention by U.S. troops, in fighting in which U.S. casualties ran into the tens of thousands.
Both wars were viewed as "limited" wars by U.S. policymakers. The goal in each case was defensive in strategic terms: to hold a line, rather than to "roll back" the enemy. Under Truman, the military command under General Douglas MacArthur first ignored and then openly challenged Administration policy (Kaufman, 1986: 144ff). The consequence was, in part, to widen the war and make an acceptable settlement much longer in coming and much more costly in American (and Korean) lives. Another part of the consequence was to spark a domestic policy confrontion between advocates of "all out victory" and those who supported restraint in the conduct of the Cold War. The unpopularity of Truman's decision to fire MacArthur sapped his own popularity, and fanned the commie hunting fires of the McCarthyite far right. It helped preclude Truman's running for another term, and helped create the interventionist minded "modern" Republican right wing.
Richard Nixon was a political product of that interventionist right. He cut his teeth on both domestic anticommunism and the "who lost China"/Korean War foreign policy debates. Yet by the time he became President, he two was resigned to limited g...