June 27, 1950 is remarkable not just for a United Nations resolution (U.N. Resolution 83) calling for the immediate end of hostilities on the Korean peninsula and authorizing member-states provide military assistance to restore peace, but also for a far more civil gathering of senators in the Oval Office. Two days after the North Koreans had violated the 38th Parallel and crossed into the territory of their southern rival, the Republic of Korea, and after the United Nations had passed a first resolution (U.N. Resolution 83) declaring the southern regime to be legally sovereign, seven senators and eight Congressmen, as well as the four uniformed chiefs of staff and the secretaries of State and Defense and their under-secretaries, convened at 11:30 in the morning, to hear what President Truman had to say. What he didn't mention at the time was, that he had also ordered the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, to neutralize the area, after declaring months earlier, that the U.S. had no part in a fight between China and Taiwan. As that June 27 meeting and his statement on the naval deployment made clear, it was all about "communism". At that meeting no one objected to Truman. But then, "Mr. Republican", Senator Robert A. Taft, the most prominent of a small cabal of isolationists, was never invited.
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