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Truman, MacArthur and the Korean War

On the morning of June 25, 1950 the military forces of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) invaded the neighboring Republic of Korea (South Korea). This would become one of the first and largest "hot wars" in the period known as the Cold War (Kaufman, 2006). The Korean War remains the least popular war in American history - less than either Vietnam or Iraq - and the war the led Harry Truman to have the lowest popularity ratings of any President in US history - lower than Nixon before he resigned and lower than George W. Bush at his lowest (Halberstam, 2007). The Korean War at the time seemed to have destroyed Truman's presidency, in part because of his firing of popular US commander Douglas MacArthur, but in the decades that followed, Truman's standoff with MacArthur and his overall strategy have helped him to rise in esteem among historians (Halberstam).

After the surrender of Germany in World War Two, but before the surrender of the Japanese, Allied leaders of the victorious powers (the US, Russia, and Great Britain) met in Potsdam, Germany to determine the fate of the world after the end of the war. One of the issues they determined was how to process the surrender of Japanese units spread throughout East Asia. It was decided that the surrenders of these troops would be divided geographically. In Korea, it was decided that the Russians would take the surrender of Japanese troops north of the 38th parallel, and that the US would handle things south of this line (Schnabel, 1992).

Soon after WWII, a Cold War broke out between the US and Russia. Several nations left divided after the War (East and West Germany, North and South Vietnam, North and South Korea) were seen by the two as tests of their competing ideologies. Rather than a strategy of direct confrontation with their foes, the Truman Administration embraced a strategy of containment, in which the Soviet Union and their communist

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Truman, MacArthur and the Korean War. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:58, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2001147.html