Practicing History

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Although every link in this chain is an “if,” together they tell us something about the conduct and the quirks of American foreign policy. What we have to ask is whether the quirks were accidents only, or was the bent built in? Was there a real alternative, or was the outcome ineluctable? Looking back to find the answer, one perceives the ghost of the present, and from the perspective of a quarter-century’s distance its outline is more clearly visible than among the too-near trees of the Pentagon Papers.

  In the circumstances of 1945 there are three main points to remember: First, the Japanese were as yet undefeated; second, American policy was concentrated urgently and almost obsessively on the need to bring Nationalists and Communists into some form of coalition; third, the American Military Observers Mission of nine, later enlarged to eighteen, members (known as the Dixie Mission), was already in contact with the Communists, having been functioning in Yenan since July 1944. Its purpose was to organize an intelligence network using Communist men and facilities in a strategic area vital to future operations, and generally to assess Communist capabilities and aims. These had become acutely important with the approach of an American landing in China (at that time still contemplated as part of the final assault) and with the approach, too, of Russian entry against Japan.

  Coalition was the central factor in American plans because only in this way would it be possible, while still supporting the legal government, to utilize Communist forces and territory against the Japanese entrenched in the north. A patched-up unity was the more imperative from our point of view because of the need to avert civil war between the Chinese parties. This above all else was the thing we most feared because it could defeat our major objective, a stable, united China after the war—and because civil chaos would tempt outsiders. If the conflict erupted before the Japanese had been defeated and repatriated, they might take advantage of it to dig themselves into the mainland. And then there was the looming shadow of the Soviet Union. In the absence of coalition, we feared the Russians might use their influence, when they entered the war, to stir up the Communists and increase the possibility of a disunited China afterward. As early as May 1941, it may be worth noting, an unpublished policy study of the Council on Foreign Relations on the interrelation of the Chinese Communists, Japan, and the Soviet Union stated: “It is vital that there be no civil war in China.”

  During November and December 1944 negotiations for coalition were pursued by Ambassador Hurley as go-between, with optimism, enthusiasm, and a minimum of acquaintance with the causes, nature, and history of the problem. On November 10 he had succeeded in hammering out with the Communists a Five-Point Plan for their participation in a coalition government. Its terms would have allowed them relative freedom of political action while acknowledging Chiang’s leadership and joint authority over their armed forces. Because Mao and his colleagues saw coalition as an avenue to American aid and, in the long run, to national power, they were prepared to pay this temporary price. To Hurley, who thought the Communists were a kind of Chinese populist Farmer-Labor party whose aim was a democratic share in national government, the terms seemed so workable and such a triumph of his own diplomacy that he signed the document along with Mao.

  On November 16, to his dismay, Chiang Kai-shek rejected the plan in toto on the ground, as he told Hurley, that to admit the Communists to government on the terms Hurley had signed would eventually result in their taking control of it. Hurley, who identified the Generalissimo’s tenure with American interest—and with his own—was ready at once to adapt coalition to the Generalissimo’s terms. That these did not reflect the realities in China was not apparent to the Ambassador, although it was to his staff, who had been observing conditions under the Kuomintang for years and now had the opportunity to visit and investigate the Communist zone. Their assessment pointed to a different American interest, and this became the critical issue: Was the American objective preservation of the Generalissimo, or was it a wider option that would not involve us in the fate of a “steadily decaying regime”?

  Hurley and Wedemeyer were convinced converts of the first thesis. It was not easy at that time to envisage China without Chiang Kai-shek. His towering reputation as national leader made it an article of faith to most outsiders that no one else could hold China together and that his fall would carry chaos in its wake. It was easy for Hurley and Wedemeyer to believe in him: The trappings of power are very persuasive. Both the new ambassador and the new commander were ambitious to show how they could succeed where General Stilwell had failed, and both saw the obvious path to success as keeping in step with the Generalissimo.

  Pressed by Hurley into making a counter-offer to the Communists, Chiang proposed a plan of coalition which would bring the Communist armed forces under Nationalist control and in return legalize the Communists as a party. Hurley promptly espoused the Generalissimo’s plan although it nullified the terms he had negotiated with Mao, and exerted his most strenuous efforts, assisted by Wedemeyer, to persuade the Communists to accept it. They naturally refused an arrangement which would have meant submission, not coalition. Concluding that negotiations through a mediator who had committed himself to the other side were useless, they broke off the talks, and from that time on ceased to trust Hurley. When Wedemeyer argued that if they came to terms with the Generalissimo the United States could send them arms and supplies, they were not persuaded because they knew Chiang would control the distribution. When Hurley offered to revisit Yenan to resume the talks, he was turned down, and when Colonel David D. Barrett, chief of the Dixie Mission, was asked to add his persuasion, he was told by Mao and Chou that they still hoped for and needed American arms but not on Chiang’s terms. They said the United States was propping up a “rotten shell” in Chiang Kai-shek, who, in spite of all the United States might do, was “doomed to failure.” Barrett left the interview feeling he had talked to two leaders who were “absolutely sure of the strength of their position.”

  Negotiations were thus deadlocked, leaving the Communists, who had made a serious effort from which they had hoped to gain much, in need of a new approach. Haphazardly at this point certain exploratory and apparently unconcerted overtures from American military sources were made to them which left them encouraged but confused. The proposals were brought on December 15 by Colonel Barrett, and simultaneously but separately by Colonel Willis H. Bird, deputy chief of OSS in China. Both projects concerned possible airborne landings of American technical units to operate jointly with Communist forces. Colonel Bird’s plan, which was the more grandiose, involved the “complete cooperation” of all Communist armed forces “when strategic use required” by the American command. Whether this plan was intended to bypass the Generalissimo or whether Colonel Bird had ever considered this aspect of the problem is not mentioned in his rather jaunty report, which does, however, make the claim that “Theater Command already agreed on principle of support to fullest extent of Communists.…”

  Colonel Barrett brought two proposals authorized by Wedemeyer’s chief of staff, General Robert B. McClure. McClure had cleared the first one, limited to 4,000 to 5,000 American technical troops, with General Chen Cheng, the Generalissimo’s chief of staff, and secured the kind of ambiguous reply which a Chinese uses to disguise “No” and an American takes to mean “Maybe.” The second, more startling proposal on December 27 carried McClure’s verbal assurance to Barrett that it had been cleared with Ambassador Hurley. It projected, after victory in Europe, a beachhead on Shantung and the landing of an entire U.S. paratroop division of some 28,000 men for whom the Communists were asked if they could take care of supplies, other than arms and ammunition, until U.S. Army supply procedures could begin to function. They said they could, although Barrett could not help wondering whether, behind Chinese composure, they might not have been slightly dazed by the responsibility and its implications.

  Faced by such prospects, uncertain how far they were authorized at the summit, the Communists understandably felt a need for clarification b
y direct contact in Washington, bypassing Hurley. More than clarification, what they wanted was recognition. The offer to make the distant journey—which would have been Mao’s first outside China—was a measure of their seriousness. Today, after twenty-five years of Mao’s vicious denunciations of the United States as the fixed—and doomed—enemy of the Socialist camp (matched by vintage Dulles, early Nixon, and others from our side), the obvious question is: Were the Chinese Communists ideologically still sufficiently flexible in 1945 really to desire an association with the United States?

  Before everything else the Chinese Communists were pragmatic. Ideological purity having proved nearly fatal in the 1920s, they had learned to adapt political action to present fact, and were ready to deal, for survival or advantage, with whatever ideological opponent the situation required. If they could deal with Chiang Kai-shek, as they had in 1936 and were prepared to again, why not the United States? What they hoped to gain can be reconstructed from the frank conversations held by Mao and Chou with John S. Service, political officer of the Dixie Mission, who reported them at length.

  Primarily they wanted to convince President Roosevelt that they, not the Kuomintang, represented the future of China. They knew that time was working in their favor, that the mandate of heaven was slowly and irresistibly shifting. If they could somehow make this plain at the policy-making level in Washington, then the United States might be persuaded to mitigate its support of Chiang and thus hasten the shift. Second, they wanted access, as a partner in a coalition government, to American arms and other munitions on the model of Tito, their Communist counterpart in Europe. On the basis of usefulness against the enemy, they considered they had no less a claim. Armament was their most serious deficiency; they had gained control of North China beyond and behind Japanese lines by an astonishing organization but without enough weapons to risk a real battle. In Washington they hoped to persuade the President of the validity of their claim. They felt the United States was blind to the real state of the Kuomintang’s decline and their own rise, and that if they could reach Roosevelt they could make this clear.

  Roosevelt’s aura as a man with sympathy for the oppressed had penetrated the remotest corners of the world. In Christ Stopped at Eboli Carlo Levi tells how, on entering a hovel in a miserable village in Godforsaken Calabria, he was confronted on the wall by a crucifix, a picture of the family’s absent son, and a picture of Roosevelt. While it is doubtful if, apart from propaganda posters of the four Allied chiefs, the American President appeared on any private walls of Yenan, he was present in the minds of the leaders. On Roosevelt’s re-election in 1944, Mao sent him a message of congratulation and received a reply in which Roosevelt said he looked forward to “vigorous cooperation with all the Chinese forces” against the common enemy, Japan. If not definitive, this was at least an opening.

  The American observers in Yenan found their hosts intensely curious about the United States, anxious to learn what they could of means and techniques, especially military, developed by the Americans. Mao, according to Major Cromley, “would grab intellectually anything about the United States that anyone could tell him.” He and his colleagues had been impressed by the steady advance of American forces in the extraordinarily difficult campaign across the Pacific, and they realized it was this that would be the main force in the defeat of the Japanese homeland. In the real world in which they now had to make their way, the United States with its money, its resources, and its current presence in Asia was the country they had to deal with—for the interim.

  “We can risk no conflict,” Mao told Service, “with the United States.” They were not concerned about adulteration by a rival ideology because they were confident of the ultimate victory of their own. They wanted American recognition of what they had accomplished and were capable of accomplishing, and thus recognition as a major party, not an outlaw. They wanted to acquire belligerent status as a party to the coming Allied victory so that they could not be ignored in the arrangements for post-war China, nor in the organization of the United Nations. And certainly they had in mind that an American connection would help them to meet that none-too-welcome day when the heavy tramp of the Soviet Union should enter Manchuria. In short, they wanted to find out at the source whether, if Chiang continued to refuse coalition, there was “any chance,” as Mao asked Service, “of American support of the Chinese Communist Party.” They wanted to know where they stood.

  The governing factor was that in their own minds they fully expected to succeed to the sovereignty of China. Here lay the problem which in the Communists’ relation to the United States eventually became the shipwreck rock. The Communist view of it was made explicit by Mao as early as August 1944: “For America to give arms only to the Kuomintang will in its effect be interference because it will enable the Kuomintang to oppose the will of the people of China.” While this may have been a subjective judgment of the will of the people, it was more realistic than otherwise, and recognized as such by American observers whose duty was to assess the evidence. As “the only group in China possessing a program with positive appeal to the people,” reported John P. Davies, second secretary of the Embassy, who was attached as political officer to the Theater Command, the Communists were the first group in modern Chinese history to have “positive and widespread popular support.… China’s destiny is not Chiang’s but theirs.” He thought this was a consideration that the United States in seeking to determine policy should keep in mind.

  The tenor of advice by our career officers both in China and the State Department at this time was that unqualified support of Chiang Kaishek was not the best means of achieving unity in China. By encouraging in Chiang a false sense of his own strength, it made him intransigent to compromise and therefore more likely to precipitate civil war than prevent it. The staff in China felt that we should retain our freedom to establish contact with the Communists, who were certain to retain North China and very likely inherit Manchuria after the war, because only through U.S. contact and economic aid could we keep them out of the coming Soviet embrace. The plea of officers in the field for greater “flexibility of approach” grew almost impassioned. Sustaining Chiang should not become, as one said, “an end in itself.” The China Affairs and Far East Divisions of the Department tried to convey the voice of the field upward to the policy-making level, even to the point of suggesting that if Chiang himself did not take remedial action, reexamination of U.S. policy would not only be justified but “very likely imperative.”

  The difficulty was the not unusual one in the conduct of American foreign policy, that the voice of the field was not reaching, or certainly not influencing, the ear at the policy-making level—in this case the President. Out of an old prejudice against career diplomats, justifiable almost anywhere but in China, Roosevelt always felt he would be better informed by a personal envoy—in this case Ambassador Hurley.

  The personality of Hurley is a major quirk in this history. One would like to think that historical factors were more rooted in natural law, less haphazard in scope, than the chance character of a minor individual who was neither heroic nor demonic. But history is not law-abiding or orderly and will often respond to a breeze as carelessly as a leaf upon a lake.

  It happened that Hurley was a man whose conceit, ambition, and very vulnerable ego were wrapped up in his mission to the point of frenzy. From birth in a miner’s cabin in Oklahoma he had risen through a Horatio Alger boyhood to the practice of law and a lucrative representation of the oil interests of the Choctaw Indians. A later client was Sinclair Oil. He made a fortune of $15 million, served overseas in World War I, became Hoover’s Secretary of War, and coated the rough ebullience of a frontier background with the glossy Republicanism of Andrew Mellon. Tall, handsome, and impressive, he dressed with the care of a Beau Brummel and, when ordered to wear civilian clothes as Ambassador, could only be induced to shed a general’s uniform and medals on the direct intervention of the President. Vanity was Hurley’s security.

 
; His initial assignment to China as special envoy to facilitate the appointment of General Stilwell as commander-in-chief of China’s armed forces had ended in a notable reverse. Instead of Hurley’s cajoling Chiang, Chiang had cajoled Hurley into supporting his demand for Stilwell’s recall. Hurley therefore felt a double need to make a success of coalition. He had wrecked his chances as mediator, however, by allying himself with the Generalissimo for the sake of the Ambassadorship. Hurley was just what Chiang had always wanted in an envoy—a man with direct access to the President and no experience of China, who was easy to manipulate through his vanity. When Ambassador Gauss resigned at the time of Stilwell’s departure, Chiang was only too pleased to ask for Hurley as successor. In a personal message to Roosevelt (sent via T. V. Soong to Hopkins, avoiding the State Department) he solicited a “more permanent” mission for Hurley, who “has my complete confidence” in dealing with the Communists, and would thus be able to make a contribution to the war effort by solving the problem of coalition. Roosevelt was lured; he believed in the efficacy of harmony. If nothing else had worked in China, maybe a person pleasing to Chiang Kai-shek might. Hurley received the appointment and owed it to Chiang.

  As a result, he at once convinced himself that his mission and the policy of the United States (“my policy,” as he sometimes called it) were to “prevent the collapse of the National Government” and “to sustain Chiang Kai-shek as President of the Republic and Generalissimo of the Armies.” No such instructions appear in the documents, and despite Hurley’s later claims, they could hardly have been oral since he was in China when he was appointed. It should be added, however, that when he stated this understanding of his mission in a rare communication to the State Department, no one disabused him. This was partly because the Department had no rein on Hurley, who generally bypassed it, and partly because it was unable to decide, except in noble generalizations, exactly what our China policy was. And no one knew for sure what it was in the President’s mind.