Amid the gloom, there was one upbeat note.

From The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam.  Page 100.  Background and context to an historical event I learned about in ninth grade in 1974 in Social Studies at the Anglo-American School in Stockholm, Sweden from Mr. Ball.  That was the Soviet misstep of boycotting the United Nations in its decision making dealing with the North Korean invasion of South Korea.  The Soviet boycott meant that all the decisions in the UN were made by America and its allies.  A mistake not repeated by the Soviet Union in the future.

For a fourteen year-old, Mr. Ball clearly was an authority and I had no reason to doubt him but his explanation seemed . . . improbable.  Little did I know then of the inanity of dynamic, evolving complex systems.  As it turns out, Mr.s Ball's explanation was reasonably accurate.  From Halberstam.

In Washington, Dean Rusk, the assistant secretary of state for the Far East, and Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff, were working their end of the teleconference between roughly 3 A.M. and 4 A.M. But because they were, relatively speaking, lower-level officials, and the hour was early, it turned out to be a slow and clumsy process. Higher authorization was always needed. These were not minor issues posed by Tokyo: they were about nothing less than war and peace. Answers did not come quickly. There were delays on a number of points and this did not please MacArthur. “This is an outrage! When I was chief of staff I could get Herbert Hoover off the can to talk to me! But here, not just the Chief of Staff of the Army delays, but the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense. They’ve got so much lead in there that it’s inexcusable.”

At about 4:30 A.M. Washington time, MacArthur confirmed his request for ground troops to Collins, and Collins called Pace, who in turn called Truman. Truman was always an early riser. His internal farm-boy clock had never left him. He was shaved by the time he got Pace’s call. Just before 5 A.M. on the morning of June 30, 1950, he approved the use of American ground troops in Korea. With that the deed was done. In the very beginning MacArthur had said that he could easily handle the invasion if only Washington would leave him alone. Now he said he needed two divisions to do it. He was, it would turn out, still underrating the enemy, and overrating the forces who would serve under his own command, including American troops.

Truman still wondered if there were a plus side to the offer of Chiang’s troops. He then called in Acheson, Harriman, Johnson, and the Joint Chiefs to talk one last time about using them. With the South Korean Army falling apart, Chiang’s offer still made some sense to the president as a stopgap measure. Acheson was sure it would bring the Chinese Communists into the war. And the Joint Chiefs wanted no part of it either.

Amid the gloom, there was one upbeat note. U.S. troops would fight under a United Nations flag. Before Truman approved the use of American ground troops, he had already gotten UN authorization—easier then than it would be in any decade to come. The UN of 1950 was still very much a reflection of American and Western European interests, the only significant dissent coming from the Soviets and their satellites. It was in some ways very much a last vestige of a white man’s world. On the Security Council vote to authorize the use of force in Korea, the only two abstentions were by non-white countries, India and Egypt. Beginning in the late 1950s and accelerating into the 1960s, the coming of the end of the colonial era, and the arrival of newly independent African and Asian and Middle Eastern nations, would change the UN’s makeup dramatically, greatly diminishing Western influence and turning it into an organization that conservative political factions in the United States and Western Europe absolutely scorned. The Russians had foolishly boycotted the Security Council meetings on Korea (ironically because they were protesting the fact that the Chinese Nationalists were still on the council), and with their veto gone, the Americans got the resolution they wanted on Tuesday, June 27, eventually giving the predominantly American force a UN flag under which to fight.

Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang, though defeated by the Chinese Communists under Mao, had retreated to Formosa (Taiwan) by 1950 but still were on the Security Council owing to their having been the wartime government in China who fought against the Japanese and as full allies of the US.