Signal Agency was directed to put in a secure call to the President of the United States at his home in Independence, Missouri.
The President took the news almost stoically, and ordered that he be kept up to date on any new developments, regardless of the hour.
The President was not surprised to hear from the Secretary of Defense that the North Koreans had invaded South Korea. He had been so informed three hours previously by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who had received a radio message from the CIA station chief in Seoul, and had immediately decided the President needed to be informed immediately, and had done so personally.
[TWO]
BLAIR HOUSE WASHINGTON, D.C. 2205 25 JUNE 1950
“Unless someone can think of something else we can do tonight,” President Harry S. Truman said, “I suggest we knock this off. I suspect we’re all going to need clear heads in the morning.”
The men at the conference table—the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Army and Air Force Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Advisor, and several other high-ranking advisors, rose to their feet.
Although there was nothing wrong with the conference room in Blair House, it was not as large, nor as comfortable as the conference room in the White House. If there was still a conference room across the street in the White House. In 1948, it had been discovered that the White House was literally falling down, in fact dangerous. Truman had made the decision to gut it to the walls and rebuild everything. In June of 1950, the reconstruction was two years into what was to turn out to be a four-year process. The last time the President had looked into the White House, it was a gutted shell.
The President had cut short his vacation in Independence and flown back to Washington—in Air Force One, a four-engine Douglas DC-6 known as the Independence— early in the afternoon.
His senior advisors had been waiting for him in Blair House, the de facto temporary White House, where the Army Signal Corps had set up a teletype conference facility with General MacArthur in the Dai Ichi Building in Tokyo.
It was essentially a closed, state-of-the-art radio teletype circuit, where what was typed in Washington was immediately both typed in Tokyo and displayed on a large screen so that everyone in the room could read it. And vice versa.
MacArthur had furnished the President what he knew— not much—about the situation in Korea, and the President had authorized MacArthur—after consultation with his staff, and through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—to send ammunition and equipment to Korea to prevent the loss of Seoul’s Kimpo airfield to the North Koreans, and to provide Air Force and Navy fighter aircraft to protect the supply planes. MacArthur had also been authorized to do whatever he considered necessary to evacuate the dependents of American military and diplomatic personnel in Korea from the war zone, and to dispatch a team to Korea to assess what was happening.
Truman had also ordered the Seventh Fleet (which was split between the Philippines and Okinawa) to sail immediately for the U.S. Navy Base in Sasebo, Japan, where it would pass into the control of Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Far East. COMNAVFORFE was subordinate to the Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, so what Truman had done was to take operational control of the Seventh Fleet from the Commander-in-Chief Pacific (CINCPAC) and give it to MacArthur.
Until they knew more about what was going on, there was nothing else that anyone in the room could think of to do.
Except for Admiral Hillenkoetter, the CIA Director, and he was considering his options to ask for a few minutes of the Commander-in-Chief’s time—alone—when the President seemed to be reading his mind.
“Admiral, would you stay behind a minute, please?” Truman asked.
“Yes, Mr. President,” the Admiral said.
It is entirely possible, the admiral thought, that I am about to have my ass chewed for calling him when I got the Seoul station chief’s radio. He didn’t say anything, but it’s possible the Chairman’s heard about it, and he would consider it going over his head.
The Chairman gave the admiral a strange look as he left the room, leaving him alone with the President.
In William Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, the OSS had technically been under the command of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Donovan had paid no attention to that at all, deciding that he