‘History Has Begun a New Chapter’: US Political-Opinion Journals and the Outbreak of the Korean War

Abstract

In the pages of the United States’ leading political-opinion journals, different ideological camps had very different answers to the issues raised by the outbreak of war in Korea in the summer of 1950. Left liberals placed a great deal of blame for the outbreak of war on South Korean President Syngman Rhee, while conservatives and hawkish liberals used the occasion to lambast President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson. Hawkish liberals welcomed the possibility of a global showdown with Communism, while conservatives disapproved of US intervention in Korea for reasons both political and constitutional. In sum, the debate that dominated the pages of US opinion journals in the first weeks and months of the Korean War was both heated and robust, and exposes the ideological fault lines of the early cold war. To wit, hawkish liberals held positions that anticipated the birth of neoconservatism some two decades later. And conservative voices utilised their newfound platforms in The Freeman and The American Mercury to attack the Truman administration on a whole host of foreign-policy issues, revealing in greater detail than has previously been shown the role that international affairs played in the birth of the New American Right.