President Eisenhower Ends the Korean War

This week (July 27) in 1953, the Korean War between the U.S.-backed government of South Korea and the Communist China-backed government (and, clandestinely, the Soviet Union) of North Korea finally came to an end. Lasting just over three years, it had cost the United States nearly 150,000 casualties.

But it could have been far worse, and the fact that it wasn’t can be attributed to the then-U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was Eisenhower who, in the presidential campaign of 1952 that pitted him against Democrat Adlai Stevenson, publicly stated in a speech that, if elected, “I shall go to Korea” to determine the best course of action regarding that war. Although Eisenhower was slightly favored to win the presidency, that statement helped ensure his victory, even though he never specifically said what he would do once he got to Korea. The fact that Eisenhower, the man who had engineered America’s victory in World War II, had promised to focus on a war most Americans wanted behind them was taken as a hopeful sign that the war would soon end.

For his part, Eisenhower genuinely wanted the war over quickly, and, ironically, it was both the military and political experience he gained in winning WWII that allowed him to end the Korean War, despite formidable opposition.

That opposition began the moment he (as promised) arrived in Korea. South Korea’s president, Syngman Rhee, immediately harangued him with the need to launch one last all-out offensive that would destroy North Korea. For his part, the commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, Gen. Mark Clark, outlined his plan for a large-scale frontal attack against the North Korean army, backed by air and sea operations against the Chinese mainland, which Clark was sure would mean final victory.

Had Adlai Stevenson won the presidency instead of Eisenhower, it is quite possible that Stevenson, a military neophyte, would have deferred to the expertise of Gen. Clark, a decorated commander who had led the hard-fought and ultimately successful Italian campaign against Nazi and Italian forces in WWII. Stevenson might also have bowed to Rhee, the head-of-state of America’s ally, and a man who, supposedly, knew the facts on the ground better than did Stevenson.

But Eisenhower, a lifelong military man with an ever-growing understanding of civilian politics, wasn’t so easily cowed. He quickly sized Rhee up as a despot, and he thought Clark’s plan was a gamble not worth taking, so he said no, and the war ended in a stalemate.

As a postscript, when Eisenhower left office in 1960, he could (and did) boast, truthfully, that after the Korean War ended, a war he inherited, not one American soldier died in combat on his watch.