The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Butterworth had been chosen because he was straight and conservative, but it was not the man who was contaminated, it was the issue; as pleasant, somewhat conservative Vincent was almost unemployable at the end of his tour, so was pleasant, conservative Butterworth. In 1950 he would be unable to take any job which required Senate confirmation (by that time Vincent was ticketed to be ambassador to Costa Rica, a seemingly safe spot, but his enemies still lurked, it was too risky, and he ended up in Tangier, where again confirmation was not necessary). When Butterworth took over, Vincent was already being questioned for loyalty. He was saved by family contacts with two powerful senators, Walter George of Georgia and Burnett Maybank of South Carolina, and the fact that Acheson knew him personally and vouched for him. “I know John Carter Vincent and there is no substance to this,” Acheson said at the time. (A few years later, when McCarthy brought loyalty charges against Vincent, by then in Switzerland, his defense counsel would have a good deal of difficulty getting Vincent to prepare his case. “He took the attitude that if things had reached this point, if even he could be considered a Communist, the hell with it; the world was going to the dogs and there was nothing to be done about it. So all he wanted to do was go off and play golf,” recalled his counsel, Bernard Fensterwald, Jr.)

  If Acheson felt a sense of personal commitment to Vincent, Dulles was hardly eager to maintain it. These China people, after all, were causing him problems, and there was no doubt about it in his mind, they had been naÏve. Once when Dulles was with Vincent, he pulled down a copy of Stalin’s Problems of Leninism, and asked if Vincent had read it. Vincent said he had not. “If you had read it, you would not have advocated the policies you did in China,” Dulles said. So it was that almost as soon as Dulles took over, he made sure Vincent was removed from the profession. A special review board created by Truman and headed by Judge Learned Hand was studying Vincent’s loyalty case at the time Dulles took office. Dulles told Judge Hand that his services were not needed, and ruled himself that while there was no “reasonable doubt as to the loyalty” of Vincent, he had demonstrated “a failure to meet the standard which is demanded of a Foreign Service Officer of his experience and responsibility at this critical time. I do not think he can usefully continue to serve the U.S. as a Foreign Service Officer.” Dulles offered him the choice of being fired or retiring, and Vincent applied for retirement.

  Service was not as lucky, if that is the word, as Vincent. He was not as well connected, and he did not know Acheson personally, which was vital in determining the Secretary’s attitude, so when a security board recommended against Service on what were extremely dubious charges, which the courts later overruled, Acheson separated Service by sundown. It was a decision made by the Truman Administration, though there is no reference to it in Acheson’s long treatment of the McCarthy period in his Present at the Creation.

  Much of the heat had been mounting even before China fell, but when Chiang collapsed completely in 1949 and the Communists took over, the impact really began to be felt. To America, China was a special country, different from other countries. India could have fallen, or an African nation, and the reaction would not have been the same. For the American missionaries loved China; it was, by and large, more exciting than Peoria, had a better life style and did not lack for worthy pagans to be converted; add to that the special quality of China, a great culture, great food, great charm, and the special relationship was cemented. The Chinese were puritanical, clean, hard-working, reverent, cheerful, all the virtues Americans most admired. And so a myth had grown up, a myth not necessarily supported by the facts, of the very special U.S.-China relationship. We helped them and led them, and in turn they loved us. A myth fed by millions of pennies put in thousands of church plates by little children to support the missionaries in their work in this exotic land which was lusting for Christianity. China was good; the Chinese were very different from us, and yet they were like us; what could be at once more romantic, yet safer. The Japanese were bad, more suspicious and could not be trusted. The Chinese were good and could be trusted.

  Thus, after a war filled with intensified propaganda, movies showing Japanese raping China, American fighting units saving Chinese, Chinese nurses saving wounded American pilots and, of course, falling in love with them, the fall of China was a shock. What had happened to the Chinese who loved us? It certified, as it were, an even harder peace, it necessitated the reorientation of our demonology (from the wartime of Good Russians, Bad Germans and Good Chinese, Bad Japanese to the postwar period of Good Germans, Bad Russians, Good Japanese, Bad Chinese). It caught this country psychologically unprepared. It was natural for a confused country to look for scapegoats and conspiracies; it was easier than admitting that there were things outside your control and that the world was an imperfect place in which to live.

  The State Department knew the crunch was coming; in August 1949 it published its White Paper on China, a document designed to show that the fall of China was the fault of Chiang and that the United States had gone as far as an ally could go. What is remarkable about the White Paper in retrospect is the intelligence and quality of the reporting. It was written by very bright young men putting their assessments on the line; in that sense it would be a high-water mark for the Department. From then on young foreign service officers would learn their lessons and hedge their bets, and muddle their reporting.

  The first assault on the Department came early in 1950, and it came in the Republican Saturday Evening Post in a series of articles which provided that material for the ensuing Republican attacks upon the Department and the Democrats. Rather than trying to hold the line for sane and thoughtful assessments, an important organ like the Post was looking for conspiratorial answers, and it had exactly the right author, former Captain Joseph Alsop, now back in America, bitter over our failure to support Chiang and the full Chiang line, anxious to get even. The title of the three-part series was “Why We Lost China,” and it was not a serious bit of journalism, a view of a decaying feudal society, but rather a re-creation of the Chennault-Chiang line. It set the tone, though slightly loftier than some successors, for the conspiracy view of the fall of China: the blame was placed on the State Department. The title is worth remembering: “Why We Lost China.” China was ours, and it was something to lose; it was an assumption which was to haunt foreign policy makers for years to come. Countries were ours, we could lose them; a President was faced with the blackmail of losing a country.

  In those days the Post was a powerful and respectable if somewhat conservative magazine; the Alsop articles were on the borderline of respectability. They were not particularly thoughtful or deep, for that is not his style, and they did not charge conspiracy; they only implied it, as is also his style (“The origin of this venture must be traced as far back as the 1930s when General Stilwell was military attaché to China and his political adviser John Davies, was vice-consul there. Among Whittaker Chambers’ celebrated pumpkin papers is a Stilwell intelligence report of this period, revealing that even in the 30s he was already strongly prejudiced against the Chinese Nationalists and in favor of the Chinese Communists. Davies’ viewpoint was approximately similar. Essentially Stilwell and Davies were victims of the then fashionable liberalism which idyllically pictured the Communists as 'democratic agrarian reformers’ . . .”). The Alsop articles emphasized the conspiratorial nature of events; they did not really raise the issue of treason, and they were all right if no one went further.

  Someone else would go further. The Alsop articles began the process of legitimizing the issue: twenty years later, both Davies and Service could single out the articles as a key to the turning point; the Post articles took the issue from the radical fringe and gave it a respectability where it would be adopted by a Republican party badly in need of issues. It would be valuable to the Republicans, but it would also be material for McCarthyism, and one of the darker chapters of this American century. McCarthy would exploit the charges to such an extent that even Alsop would
be appalled. It was one thing to get even with a few of the younger and more foolish boys in the State Department, but it was another when McCarthy went after old and trusted friends like Dean—Dean Acheson. There was a memorable moment in Wisconsin when McCarthy had been making his charges, reckless as usual, against the top boys, and Alsop, a member of the press corps, stood up and angrily challenged him, shouting that this simply was not true; Alsop could vouch for men like Acheson, he knew them personally. Yet as the pressures against the China officers grew, Alsop became outraged and behaved well, testifying in their behalf and working to get lawyers for them, though not behaving so well that he was not unwilling to try some of the same tactics twenty years later when Vietnam arose as an issue, telling people in Washington that dovish reporters were traitors (and of course letting people know that he had behaved well, telling a reporter years later on the subject of Owen Lattimore, a distinguished Sinologist who had been particularly abused in those years: “Lattimore was a perfect fool, of course. It’s awful to have to defend fools and knaves, but sometimes you do have to . . . And there is a difference between foolishness and treason”). Years later he would sit in Saigon bars and tell reporters there that they were fools, that they would be investigated by congressional committees for their mistakes, but that he would testify in their behalf.

  Not everybody made the distinction between foolishness and treason. It was not a particularly propitious time for distinctions, even those as unsubtle as this. For it was 1950 now. We had lost China, the Republicans were hungry, the Democrats were clearly on the defensive. Had they been too soft on the Communists? Too muddled? They would rally now. To make sure that they did, to take the last measure of flexibility out of an increasingly inflexible foreign policy, there was the coming of Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin. Tail gunner Joe. The accidental demagogue. How quickly he came and how quickly he disappeared, and how much he left behind. He had been elected to the Senate in 1946, beating a too liberal and too confident Bob La Follette in the Republican primary, capitalizing on and vastly exaggerating his own war record in the election. “He and millions of other guys kept you from talking Japanese . . . Congress needs a tail gunner . . . America needs Fighting Men . . . These Men who fought upon foreign soil to Save America have earned the right to Serve America in times of peace . . .” He had gone on to win the general election; he was a good candidate, forceful, physical, he was part Populist in a state where Populist roots went deep. There was a sense of shrewdness to him, a sense of the jugular on an issue, yet also a lack of seriousness, and an attention span of marked limitations. But the physical energy was there, it was part of him. There was a certain pathos too. Though he was playing this role, Joe the rugged fighter against all those sinister forces and effete Easterners, there was a feeling that more than anything he wanted to be accepted as one of the boys, to be good old Joe, to be the outsider welcomed in.

  Four years after he was elected he was looking for an issue; he could not, after all, keep running against the Japanese. In January 1950 he found it. On January 7 he had dinner with some friends, all Catholics: William Roberts, an ex-Marine and a liberal adviser of Drew Pearson; Professor Charles Kraus, a political science instructor at Georgetown, also an ex-Marine; and Father Edmund Walsh, vice-president of Georgetown, regent of its very conservative school of foreign service, a man who had been at war with Communism for three decades and had just written a book on the Communists entitled Total Power. At the dinner in the Colony Restaurant, McCarthy outlined his problem; he needed an issue that would catch attention and excite the voters. What about the St. Lawrence Seaway, Roberts suggested. No sex appeal, said McCarthy. Then McCarthy talked about a national pension plan, $100 a month to everyone over sixty-five. Too utopian, the others argued (the mind boggles for a moment; suppose he had gone to pension plans instead of Communists. Would history have been different?). After dinner they moved from the restaurant to Roberts’ office. Father Walsh began to talk about his favorite subject, Communism. It was, he said, a major issue, and it would be increasingly important. As Walsh spoke, McCarthy picked him up on it. It sounded right; he had done a little of it himself once or twice, and the feedback had always been good. As McCarthy thought about it, he became excited; it was a real issue, and it could be used. The government, he said, was full of Communists: “The thing to do is hammer away at them.” Some of the others warned him that he would have to be careful; he would have to do his homework and be very accurate (later they would all disown him). But it was too late, McCarthy was already on his way.

  On February 9, 1950, McCarthy flew into Wheeling, West Virginia, where he made the first of his major Red-baiting Communist-conspiracy charges: “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department . . .” His timing could not have been better; in four months the Korean War began, and because the China experts were already in disrepute, the State Department did not heed their warnings on what American moves might bring the Chinese into the war. The warnings unheeded, the Chinese entered, and the anti-Communist passions against the China experts mounted. It was a Greek thing.

  It had really begun. The issues were drawn, false issues; the real issues were postwar fear and uncertainty. Around the country he flew, reckless and audacious, stopping long enough to make a new charge, to exhibit a new list, a good newsworthy press conference at the airport, hail-fellow well met with the reporters, and then on to the next stop, the emptiness of the charge never catching up with him, the American press exploited in its false sense of objectivity (if a high official said something, then it was news, if not fact, and the role of the reporter was to print it straight without commenting, without assaulting the credibility of the incredulous; that was objectivity). It was like a circus; he was always on the move, his figures varied, his work was erratic and sloppy, he seemed to have no genuine interest in any true nature of security. It sometimes seemed as if he too were surprised by the whole thing, how easy it was, how little resistance he met, and so he hurtled forward to newer, larger charges. But if they did not actually stick, and they did not, his charges had an equally damaging effect: they poisoned. Where there was smoke, there must be fire. He wouldn’t be saying those things unless there was something to it. And so the contamination remained after the facts, or lack of them, evaporated; long after the specifics had faded into obscurity, the stain remained. Not just of lowly people, but of Acheson, and even Marshall. Even the figure of the stature of Marshall, the most distinguished soldier-servant of an entire era, was stained by it. So was the Democratic party, and the State Department. He knew no bounds—he was attacking the very government officials who thought that they themselves would determine the scope and limits of anti-Communism.

  All of which did not displease the Republican party. The real strength of McCarthy was not his own force or brilliance, it was the acquiescence of those who should have known better. Very few performed well in that period. The press was willingly exploited by him; very few stood and fought (even the much-heralded Edward R. Murrow documentary of McCarthy was shown in March 1954 after McCarthy had attacked the Army, four years after the Wheeling speech). It was as if the press too felt guilty, haunted by its past. The Democratic party did not combat McCarthy or the bases of his charges. A few individuals did, but the congressional leadership did not confront him. It decided to let him spend himself, run his course. When he had gone too far, then they would turn on him, which they did—by going too far they meant of course that he had begun to attack the Republicans themselves. So the Democratic party, victim of his charges, did not fight as an institution, nor use its real force, but the Republicans were worse. They welcomed him; the more he assaulted the Democrats, the better for them; the Demo
crats were on the defensive, and the Republicans were the beneficiaries. He was, in the words of one observer, “like a pig in a minefield for them.” “Joe,” said John Bricker, one of the more traditional Republican conservatives, a candidate for Vice-President in 1944, “you’re a real SOB. But sometimes it’s useful to have SOBs around to do the dirty work.”