Corcoran, unlike almost everyone else in Washington before or since, took no title and sought no credit. Posing as a middle-level official in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, he had a standard-size office without even a picture of himself and Skipper. Corcoran observed, “[Justice] Holmes told me, ‘Never, never reach for a title, for there will always be others who want it. Instead, aspire to command.’ ”46
For a few years in the 1930s, young Tommy the Cork was the apple of FDR’s eye. Corcoran would enter the White House early in the morning through a back door and ascend a private staircase to FDR secretary Missy LeHand’s office, which connected to the Oval Office. As he later explained, “That way I avoided crossing paths with any of Roosevelt’s old guard and kept the jealousies down to a manageable level.”47 When FDR wanted to hear the morning gossip, Tommy was there to regale the president with the latest news using the theatrical and debate skills he had honed at Brown. When FDR sought sound legal advice, there was Corcoran—as Frankfurter proclaimed, one of the best legal minds in America.
When overworked senators and congressmen, who at that time did not have large professional staffs, needed help drafting legislation, Tommy was ready to assist. (Corcoran teamed with another Hotdog, Ben Cohen, to write much of the Securities Exchange Act, developed to regulate and revive confidence in Wall Street.) Once, after dazzling a group of senators, Tommy received a phone call from Roosevelt, who exclaimed, “By God, you’re the first man I’ve had who could handle himself on the Hill.”48
Tommy was a jack-of-all-trades; he even wrote some of Roosevelt’s best lines, including one in what would become known as his “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech: “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.” And when Roosevelt relaxed in the evening with Missy, there was Corcoran, cracking jokes and playing FDR’s favorite ballads—“The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Father O’Flynn”—on the piano or accordion.
Washington insiders saw Corcoran as one of the most powerful men in the country.49 Vice President John Nance Garner told a colleague, “If I was going to rob a bank, I’d want to go along with Tommy Corcoran.”50 One in the know said, “The role of chief advisor is undoubtedly held at present by Thomas Corcoran, ‘Tommy the Cork.’ ”51 FDR’s son Elliott went further, writing that Corcoran “had a major hand in most items of New Deal legislation” and “apart from my father, Tom was the single most influential individual in the country.”52
In his Washington discussions, T.V. painted a picture of a New China whose population admired America and yearned to embrace Jesus and Jefferson. Soong pointed out the value of four hundred million potential new customers for America’s goods and assured Morgenthau and the Hotdogs that Chiang was fighting the Japanese and that the bandit Mao was on his last legs. FDR’s men, having taken notice of the model Chinese junk on Roosevelt’s desk, listened up.
Henry Morgenthau longed to help birth New China, but as chairman of the Farm Board, he was hardly well positioned within the U.S. government to deal with the Middle Kingdom. The best he could offer T.V. was a loan of fifty million dollars’ worth of wheat and cotton. Soong assured Morgenthau and FDR that such a large surge of valuable commodities would stimulate China’s milling sector, strengthening Chiang in his fight against the Japanese. Roosevelt approved the fifty-million-dollar loan from his best American friend to his best Chinese friend. A frustrated Secretary Hull later wrote in his memoirs that Morgenthau often took “long steps across the line of State Department jurisdiction” and “acted as if he were clothed with authority to project him into the field of foreign affairs.”53
Soong returned to China a hero, for, like Father Charlie, he had brought home some American treasure. Unremarked upon by the Roosevelt administration, big sister Ailing controlled or was an investor in many of China’s largest wheat and cotton mills. Indeed, Father Charlie had—with Julian Carr’s help—imported the first American-made milling equipment to Shanghai. Morgenthau’s wheat and cotton would flow through Ailing’s hands.
Via loans and aid efforts, FDR hoped he could goad Chiang into a policy of “unity by resisting”—getting Chiang to unite with Mao to fight the Japanese. Chiang, however, consulting with his Nazi advisers on how to vanquish Mao, remained intent on his policy of “unity before resisting.” The waste of the first fifty million dollars could have been a warning to someone who understood the simple realities in China. But like the ineffective missionaries before him, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would keep chasing the mirage, failing again and again over the next decade to exercise his will in China.
Later, after Roosevelt’s death, many would complain of the undue influence of a well-funded, politically connected China Lobby that distorted U.S.-China relations, had a baleful effect on America’s democratic institutions, backed Senator Joseph McCarthy on his who-lost-China rampage, and caused the U.S. to spurn Mao Zedong and support Chiang Kai-shek in an invented New China on the island of Taiwan. The roots of this China Lobby lay in T. V. Soong’s successful penetration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration in 1933. At the time, few noticed that FDR was running U.S.-Chinese relations off to the side. Secrecy was key to Roosevelt’s technique. FDR once told Morgenthau what Grandpa Delano had taught him at Algonac—“Never let your left hand know what your right is doing”—and Morgenthau had asked, “Which hand am I, Mr. President?”
Roosevelt replied: “My right hand, but I keep my left hand under the table.”54
Roosevelt’s aid not only fattened Nationalist coffers but also boosted T. V. Soong’s ego. Upon his return to China, he quarreled with the Generalissimo, arguing that Chiang should use the proceeds of the loan to improve the civilian economy and oppose the Japanese. Chiang did not appreciate the advice. Ailing sidelined little brother T.V. and put forth her husband, H. H. Kung, who brought promises from Italy’s Benito Mussolini to fund and build an air force. T.V.’s American mercenary Colonel Jouett had performed well but did not have a foreign government footing the bills, and Kung’s Italian offer was too good to turn down. H. H. Kung took over T. V. Soong’s portfolio as finance minister. On the outside, it appeared as if a big change had taken place, but it was simply a shuffling of duties between Ailing’s little brother and her husband, with the reins still firmly in her hands.
With guidance from both Hitler’s and Mussolini’s militaries, Chiang began his fourth Bandit Extermination Campaign in April of 1933. The result was the same as it had been for the previous three campaigns: Mao lured the Generalissimo’s superior forces into deep positions and then slashed and hammered them. Chiang wrote to his field commander General Chen Cheng that he considered this fourth defeat at Mao’s hands his “greatest humiliation.” Cheng agreed and responded that in his opinion, fighting Mao was a “lifetime job” and a “life sentence.” Chiang then removed the general from command.55 So many of Chiang’s foreign arms flowed into Mao’s hands that Mao jokingly referred to Chiang as his supply sergeant.
From Moscow, Joseph Stalin viewed what was going on in China with uncomprehending eyes. Ideological divergence was perhaps the greatest crime against Stalinism, so the Communist leader hatched a plan. As Mao was beating Chiang, a group of urban-oriented Chinese Communists had traveled to Moscow, where Stalin indoctrinated them in proper Marxist thought and then dispatched these Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks, as they were later known, back to China. Their mission was to tilt the Chinese Communist Party away from Mao’s rural pipe dreams and back toward a focus on urban workers. The Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks allowed Mao to continue as the chairman of the Soviet Chinese Republic but in name only; in reality, they took control. Philip Short wrote in Mao: A Life,
Six times, in the twelve years since he had become a Communist, he had been pushed aside… on all previous occasions, however, he had either had powerful friends, who eventually came to his aid, or he had withdrawn for tactical reasons, prefiguring a return in strength later on. This time he had been forced out by a centra
l leadership which was implacably hostile to him.56
Meanwhile, Chiang was in his capital of Nanking, huddling with his foreign military advisers, who sold him on the idea of slowly strangling Mao’s forces by surrounding them with thousands of cement blockhouses from which relentless machine-gun and artillery fire could be coordinated. For the fifth Bandit Extermination Campaign, Chiang’s troops built such blockhouses, moving forward in small steps only when well protected by artillery and airplanes. In turn, the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks foolishly abandoned Mao’s mobile and guerrilla strategies in favor of conventional warfare. As Mao later observed, “It was a serious mistake to meet the vastly superior Nanking forces in positional warfare, at which the Red Army was neither technically nor spiritually at its best.”57
As Chiang’s troops advanced, they killed peasants in their path, an attempt to dry up the wellspring from which Mao’s warriors flowed. Chiang’s troops left behind a wasteland of torched houses and piles of rotting bodies, with over one million dead.
Realizing that Chiang was too powerful to beat in a head-to-head match, the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks decided that their followers must flee to the west to save themselves. On October 16, 1934, about ninety thousand troops began what was later called the Long March. It started out as a great disaster, the urban-oriented Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks stumbling through the wholly unfamiliar Chinese countryside. These true Communists had no real military experience and managed in the first month to lose half their army in skirmishes with Chiang. It soon became clear that Stalin’s students were in over their heads, overwhelmed by the difficulties of managing a constantly harassed military force that was far from pavements and streetlights. Their suffering was so severe that Chiang boasted that he had exterminated the menace of Communism. The civil war, at long last, seemed over.
Mao had tagged along, but because of his heretic status, he had not been consulted in the planning. It was impossible, however, for the new leadership to ignore the respect that the rank and file had for Mao. Pummeled and out of excuses, in early January 1935 at the town of Zunyi in Guizhou Province, the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks—much to their disgust—handed over the reins to the man who was against everything Marx had theorized and real Communists like Joseph Stalin practiced.
In a stroke of tactical genius, Mao recast what had been a humiliating retreat into what he called a triumphal march, portraying it as an advance to confront the Japanese in China’s north, a noble effort, unlike Chiang’s policy of Chinese fighting Chinese.
Edgar Snow wrote that the Long March was “the biggest armed propaganda tour in history.”58 The “poor man’s army” staged mass meetings and theatrical performances at which appreciative peasants learned that Mao would help them get land, lower their taxes, improve their lives, push back Chiang’s armies, and oppose the Japanese invaders. Mao’s Robin Hood reputation preceded him and “oppressed peasant associations” petitioned him to come to their villages. In the end, Mao and his troops passed through provinces populated by tens of millions of peasants.
In the spring of 1935 the southern city of Kunming was abuzz about the approach of the poor man’s army.59 The American vice-consul in Kunming was John Service. Service’s wife and many foreigners had evacuated to Haiphong, French Indochina, but Service remained in Kunming, as he had unique survival skills: he had been born in 1909 in China (Chengdu, Sichuan Province) to missionary parents who lived in a traditional Chinese compound. Service was an intelligent and precocious child, bilingual and fascinated by China. By the time he was ten years old, he was taking thirty-mile strolls through the Chinese countryside, chatting his way across various warlords’ territories. Service also met other missionaries’ children, like John Davies.
The years 1936–37 saw the Japanese and Mao Zedong expand their holdings while Chiang Kai-shek abandoned his capital of Nanking and moved to Chungking.
At the age of eleven, Service entered the Shanghai American School, joined the Boy Scouts, and took long walks through Shanghai to acquaint himself with the city and its colorful denizens. In 1927, the year that Chiang and Mayling were married, Service entered Oberlin College, in Ohio, where his youthful trekking in China paid off: he became a star long-distance runner, winning the state conference’s mile competition three years in a row and serving as Oberlin’s track team captain. After graduation, Service heard that his boyhood pal John Davies had become a U.S. diplomat in China and he decided to become one also.
John Service was one of the few Americans in China with the language skills and cultural experience to understand the Chinese peasants’ opinions about the poor man’s army. They reported that Mao’s warriors treated them with respect and paid for food, water, and shelter. Service recalled, “It made a tremendous impression because people were not used to being paid for anything that was provided to soldiers.”60
Mao led his band for six thousand miles, about twice the width of the American continent, as he spearheaded one of the most remarkable sagas of human courage and endurance in history. Mao was near death more than once, his wife carried shrapnel in her body, and perhaps eighty thousand died. As Mao later remembered, they traveled “across the longest and deepest and most dangerous rivers of China, across some of its highest and most hazardous mountain passes, through the country of fierce aborigines, through the empty grasslands, through cold and through intense heat, through wind and snow and rainstorms, pursued all the way by [Chiang’s armies].”61 Chiang’s troops pursued and attacked them from beginning to end; there was about one skirmish a day. The marchers averaged an incredible twenty-four miles daily, a phenomenal pace for a harassed and beleaguered army traveling over some of the most challenging terrain on earth.
Colonel Jouett’s mercenary effort in China had received scant notice in the United States but it was front-page news in Japan, where the popular press dramatized the American threat with detailed maps and articles about U.S. planes attacking Japan from bases in China. Members of Japan’s parliament charged that the American government was sending “many aviators to China as instructors,” which threatened the Japanese homeland.62
On April 17, 1934, Japan’s Foreign Office issued a statement objecting to the Roosevelt administration’s “supplying China with war planes, building aerodromes in China, and detailing military instructors or military advisers to China.”63 The Japanese ambassador to the United States warned Roosevelt in an interview that appeared in the Washington Star, “All the new purchases of airplanes are intended by the Chinese to be used eventually against Japan so we cannot tolerate such things… any assistance given to the Chinese which might help them to continue their internal wars or to prepare themselves to fight Japan will have to be stopped.”64 In a front-page declaration in the New York Times that continued on inside for six columns, vice minister for foreign affairs Yosuke Matsuoka loudly complained about “the sales of American fighting planes and the training of Chinese aviators by former American military officers.”65
Colonel Jouett was now vulnerable, his protector T. V. Soong having been pushed aside in favor of H. H. Kung and the Italian government now providing airplanes and pilots. Chiang informed Jouett in July 1934 that when his contract expired, in June 1935, it would not be renewed. Jouett wrote a letter directly to President Roosevelt seeking U.S. government support. Pointing to the Italian domination of Chinese aviation, Jouett asked Roosevelt to write Chiang and finance minister Kung to express his approval of Jouett’s work and suggest a continuance of the mission.
Roosevelt referred Jouett’s letter to the Department of State for comment. State had never approved of Jouett’s mission, as its central policy in Asia was to avoid offending Japan, and it responded huffily to Jouett: “It is felt that action on the part of the Chinese or of the American or of both Governments tending to give the impression that the American Government is inciting the Chinese Government to military preparedness or is assisting that Government in its own program of preparedness or is attempting to create special bonds between the military for
ces of the two countries would have a net effect disadvantageous to each and to both countries.”66
The Chinese contract for Jouett’s mission was allowed to expire on June 1, 1935. Chiang awarded Jouett the Order of the Commander of the Jade, and Jouett returned to the United States. Few Americans remained in China as instructors, as Mussolini’s Italians were now predominant.
Mao Zedong and the approximately eight thousand survivors of the Long March eventually made their way to the town of Yan’an in northern China. Yan’an is in an arid, sun-drenched, dusty region of loess soil. For millennia, the winds of North China have blown particles of yellow silt larger than clay but finer than sand. The silt settles finely and loosely in layers; in some areas, the resulting loess is several hundred feet thick. Loess is easy to dig into, and throughout Chinese history, millions have lived in caves burrowed into the face of loess cliffs, accommodations that stay warm in winter and cool in summer. Here, in Yan’an, Mao would establish a safe rear base and mold the men who would lead China. For miles around, the loess was broken up by deep eroded gullies that made it difficult for wheeled vehicles to penetrate the area, and although Chiang’s and Japan’s planes bombed Yan’an frequently, the sorties did not disturb even the flower vase on Mao’s deep subterranean desk.
Mao dug his new empire into the sides of Yan’an’s hills. Huge caves housed classrooms, theaters, hospitals, training fields, barracks, homes, and supply depots. Mao turned Yan’an into an idea factory. He attracted the young and adventurous, indoctrinated them in his thinking, and sent them back to their villages to oppose the Japanese and promote revolution. Mao established a university for military study in a large natural cave. As the chairman lectured, his commanders squatted on stone stools and used soft slabs of stone as notepads. (Among the topics inevitably discussed were the merits of the traditional Communist model of revolution. Mao argued that the Russian and Chinese revolutions would be very different, and he mocked those who studied the Russian model as “cutting the feet to fit the shoes.”67)
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