Blood on Whose Hands?

"I've always said that when the break came, it would come on foreign policy, and this is it," said a top-ranking Republican last week. "I don't care how many figures the Administration produces, the people won't get over it. Something went haywire somewhere. They had the money. Where are the guns and tanks and planes? That's what they're asking and they don't want any mealy-mouthed answers."

In the Senate last week, Democrats reacted with the fury of men who knew they had been hurt. They hurled orator after orator into the attack. They centered their fire on the statement framed by the four G.O.P. members of the Foreign Relations Committee (TIME, Aug. 21) blaming Administration "blunders" for the U.S.'s hasty postwar demobilization, for "failing to recognize the true aims and methods" of Soviet Russia, for giving the Kremlin "a green light to grab whatever it could in China, Korea and Formosa." Snapped Democrat Tom Connally: "A document of complaint and quarrelsomeness." Added Connecticut's Brien McMahon: "These masters of hindsight seek to cut themselves in on the victories of our foreign policy and to divorce themselves from our defeats . . . The record shows that more than one-half of the Republican party has vigorously opposed ... the Greek-Turkish, EGA and Atlantic Pact policies."

Desk-Bound Intellectuals. The Democrats, on the defensive for what was indeed a wretched record, even suffered a defection from their own ranks. Nevada's Pat McCarran, a blustery Democrat whose chief concern with foreign policy has been a single-minded drive to bring Spain into ECA, declared that the dust had settled long enough in Asia. Roared McCarran: "I am quite familiar with the doctrine of those desk-bound intellectuals who got all mixed up, those gentlemen who would probably describe Al Capone as the product of an unhappy childhood, those gentlemen who saw a boil on China's neck and called in the executioner with his ax, thinking he was a surgeon."

Maryland's Millard Tydings bitterly challenged the G.O.P. charge that only $200 worth of military assistance had actually reached Korea before the attack. Tydings read a Defense Department report that the U.S. occupation forces had left the South Koreans $301 million worth of military supplies, that in all, Korean aid amounted to $496 million. Minority Leader Kenneth Wherry leaped to argue. Looking hard at Wherry, Tydings said: "It does not lie well in the mouths of any of us, particularly those who have opposed the arms-assistance program by their speeches and their votes, to find fault."

"Beneath Comment." Wherry turned bright red. He had voted for aid to Korea and China, he shouted.* "It does not matter whether I did or not," said Wherry. "The blood of our boys is on Secretary Acheson's shoulders, and on nobody else's."

Next day an angry Harry Truman snapped that this was "a contemptible statement and beneath comment," and the reporters could quote him. Wherry snapped right back: "The President's failure to remove Acheson, after repudiation of his stupid foreign policies, is contemptible."

Side Shows & Windmills. The debate did not end there, nor would it end soon. All over the nation, G.O.P. orators pounded at their new issue. In Des Moines, G.O.P. state chairmen from twelve states demanded the resignation of Acheson and Secretary of Defense Johnson for "demonstrated ineptitude." Out in Illinois, where Majority Leader Scott Lucas was hard-pressed for reelection, his opponent, ex-Congressman Everett Dirksen, shifted his campaign from economy and attacks on the Marshall Plan to the Korean war. Among the heat-shimmering, cotton-candy wheels and fried-chicken stands of Illinois's State Fair, Dirksen reminded fairgoers that only eight months ago the President had said that the state of the union was good. "It is not good now, Mr. President," cried Dirksen, "because of your neglect of our defenses . . . The blunderers and stupid policymakers sowed the seeds of war in Washington. That's why young people die today."

Next day, the Democrats mustered 5,000 faithful from Chicago, and Vice President Alben Barkley, to whoop it up for Lucas. "Oh, yes, my opponent has the answer to Yalta," Lucas shouted. "He wants to repudiate the Yalta agreement. But why didn't he come forward with this proposal when he was a member of Congress ?"Illinois's Governor Adlai Stevenson added the other half of the Democrats' rebuttal. "There is no room now," said Stevenson, "for side shows and patent medicine, for epithets and slander, for diversions and nonsense . . . Our problem is to fight Communism, not windmills."

No one knew better than the Democrats, however, that victories in Korea, not arguments, was their best hope now.

*Before Korea, Minority Leader Wherry voted for Korean economic aid but opposed the whole military-assistance program (including aid to Korea). He voted against authorizing foreign economic aid (including aid to China) and the Atlantic Pact, called Greek-Turkish aid "a military adventure," voted against peacetime selective service in 1948, declared there was room for "tremendous savings" in the military budget.

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