The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  Warren Delano’s grandson believed that China had to regenerate itself, and what better example existed than his New Deal? Roosevelt adopted a respectful tone with Chiang, praising him as “a fellow leader of democracy,” with the expectation that Chiang would “become a popular leader on the Roosevelt model.”33 Barbara Tuchman later wrote that Roosevelt’s approach to China “was a policy of make-believe [that] grew out of genuine conviction.”34

  Although FDR officially delegated him, Currie traveled to China on a Soong-Chiang syndicate salary plus expenses. T. V. Soong gave Currie an advance of $2,500 before he left.35 The investment in the Harvard Hotdog was worthwhile, T.V. assured Chiang, because Currie was “fully alive to [the] necessity of expediting decision on aircraft, particularly on bombers, in view of the general situation and the continuous bombing of Chungking.”36

  Mayling arranged two meetings between Chiang and Currie, both on weekends in February. The president’s emissary did not bring his own interpreter; there were likely few, if any, people in the Roosevelt administration who were fluent enough in Chinese to interpret, so Currie relied on Mayling and chief propagandist Hollington Tong to translate. Chiang’s responses could thus be sanitized and embellished by a smart Wellesley girl and a sharp Columbia journalism school graduate who knew how to handle Harvard men.

  Currie wrote of their first encounter, “Chiang met me as I entered the room. He shook hands warmly and smiled, making a succession of little friendly noises (this went on throughout the conference). He placed me next to him. I gave him the President’s letter, after thanking him for his greetings and reception.” Physically, the Chinese leader was more than expected: “Chiang is a handsome and striking person. His photographs do not do him justice as they miss his coloring and the sparkle of his wide-open eyes and the general impression of health and vitality. He appeared to be a little nervous during the interview and I was extremely nervous. We both kept our hands clasped.”37

  Lauchlin Currie and Mayling Soong. “We discussed the state of democracy in China,” Currie told FDR. (Carl Mydans / Getty Images)

  Chiang said that he had a great “sentimental attachment and admiration for America,” that President Roosevelt was “the greatest man in the world,” and that he’d read “every word” of FDR’s speeches.38 Currie quickly replied with the words that must have confirmed to Chiang and Mayling that, after a decade of trying, they had finally hooked their barbarian:

  In regard to America’s supply of military equipment to China there is no question at all. One great assurance in this respect from America is the fact that besides the sentimental reasons America is helping China in her own interests. Your war is our war.39

  Here was one of Frankfurter’s more brilliant Harvard Hotdogs, the first economic adviser to a president in American history, FDR’s point man on China, and yet he had no idea that Chiang’s war was not against the Japanese but against Mao. The American misperception of “your war is our war” would embolden Chiang and enrich the Soongs as they sat back and waited for their American barbarians to perform their assigned function.

  The Lend-Lease pipeline started in the Oval Office, and Mayling asked Currie to suggest to Roosevelt that he use her private code system to keep messages between Chungking and the White House outside of regular diplomatic channels. Currie agreed.

  Currie gently explained that if Chiang made himself more politically popular by implementing FDR-style policies, he could win the battle against Mao for China’s hearts and minds, just as FDR had cobbled his New Deal coalition together in the face of Republican opposition. He suggested that—like Roosevelt—Chiang should employ a “technique of making adjustments rather than repression.”40

  No British, Russian, French, or Japanese diplomat would have believed that Chiang could become a New Deal liberal—this, too, was part and parcel of the mirage. Currie had clearly laid out what Roosevelt expected Chiang to do in exchange for Lend-Lease aid: fight Japan, unite with Mao, cut military expenditures, raise land taxes, boot out the tradition-bound conservatives, and let a liberal progressive China bloom. But Chiang’s number-one priority since he’d teamed with the Soongs had been to kill Mao and all Communists. Just two months earlier, Chiang’s allies had ambushed thousands of Mao’s staff. A United Front?

  FDR’s suggestion that Chiang balance his budget by cutting military expenditures and raising land taxes must have confirmed to Chiang how little Roosevelt understood reality in China. Chiang’s power rested on his ability to funnel barbarian aid to warlord allies. Cutting military expenditures would destroy Chiang’s power base. And raising taxes? One of Mao’s main attractions for the peasants was that he was reducing their onerous taxes. Trying to squeeze more out of the beleaguered Chinese peasant would only increase animosity toward Chiang’s regime; he’d be playing into Mao’s hands.

  Roosevelt’s recommendation that Chiang move away from an army-dominated rule of repression to an accommodating populist New Deal liberalism must also have amazed the Generalissimo. Ailing Soong had allied China’s richest family with Chiang precisely because he had a large club and would use it to beat out the liberal flames that Mao had lit in Chinese hearts.

  Like Chiang’s Anti-Opium Suppression Bureau that was actually Ailing’s opium monopoly, the legislature and government bureaus that Professor Currie saw on his tour were like movie-lot fronts designed to fool Americans. So, too, were Chiang’s replies to Currie’s questions; they were curated distortions of what Currie knew FDR wanted to hear. So Currie concluded that Chiang was eager to follow in FDR’s footsteps, that the Chinese would embrace the New Deal creed, and that Roosevelt was right to imagine China as America’s good friend.

  Mayling and Chiang hosted a gala banquet for their bought-and-paid-for barbarian. Currie sat next to Ailing’s husband, the rotund, chuckling H. H. Kung, supposedly the seventy-fifth lineal descendant of Confucius. A 1916 Yale graduate, Kung was fluent in American English; he was also Standard Oil’s man in China and one of the country’s wealthiest citizens. Currie wrote that he and Kung talked about “the extent of democracy in China.” Currie enjoyed himself, noting, “I was toasted three times.”41 Chiang wrote to T. V. Soong in Washington, “When [Currie] returns to the United States he will surely prove to be of the greatest assistance to our cause.”42

  Currie’s confidential report to FDR was a jumble of mirage assumptions that would eventually lead the United States down a disastrous path in Asia. Furthering the New Deal fantasy, Currie wrote that Chiang “wished to avoid great inequality in incomes and wealth, and that he was determined to carry out land reforms so that those who tilled the soil would own it.”43 Currie assured FDR that Chiang would serve as an effective block to Japan’s push into Southeast Asia: “The Indochina-Chinese border is now very strongly defended and the General Staff is confident that the Japanese cannot penetrate there.”44 Currie was particularly impressed with Chiang’s foresight:

  The Chinese are making great efforts to build a number of airfields that can carry the weight of our flying fortresses. I inspected one at Chengtu, which was being built by 75,000 peasants with no power-driven machinery of any kind. The man in charge was a Chinese civil engineer trained at the University of Illinois.45

  As for troops, here too Currie saw only a sliver of the picture. “By all accounts the morale of the Chinese soldier is good,” he wrote. “Certainly, in the Military Academy I visited, I could not hope to see a harder-working nor more serious-minded group of men.”46

  Currie was clearly not completely oblivious to Chiang’s imperfection as a political leader, because he wrote, “In connection with the growing disaffection of the liberal elements… I argued as strongly as I dared for a policy of conciliation rather than suppression.”47

  Much of Currie’s report read as if it had sprung from Roosevelt’s mind; if FDR treated Chiang as a liberal democrat, Currie wrote, Chiang would grow into the role. Currie admitted that while Chiang was a dictator running a dictatorship, he sincerely wanted to be
more like the leader of the free world. Currie urged FDR to obscure the distasteful aspects of Chiang’s rule and promote the New China mirage:

  I think that Chiang can be held in line with a little care and attention from America. His attitude toward America is compounded partly of sentiment and partly of self-interest. He admires America, and particularly you, tremendously, and to be treated as an equal or ally would mean a great deal to him.… He is most anxious that China be regarded as a “democracy,” taking part in the common world struggle of democracies.…

  I think it is most important, in addition to giving material aid, to go out of your way to say nice things about China and to speak of her in the same terms now used toward England.48

  A few days after receiving Currie’s report, in a speech at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, President Roosevelt proclaimed,

  China… expresses the magnificent will of millions of plain people to resist the dismemberment of their historic nation. China, through the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, asks our help. America has said that China shall have our help.49

  After he briefed Roosevelt, Currie billed T. V. Soong $1,388.88 for his salary from January 25 to March 11, 1941, with expenses of $1,681.53.50 Secretary Morgenthau complained to his staff, “The trouble with Mr. Currie is, I don’t know half the time whether he is working for the President or T. V. Soong, because half the time he is on one payroll and the rest of the time he is on the other.”51

  Chapter 9

  A WAR OVER OIL

  The support of America against the Japanese was the government’s only hope for survival; to sway the American press was critical. It was considered necessary to lie to it, to deceive it, to do anything to persuade America that the future of China and the United States ran together against Japan. That was the only war strategy of the Chinese government.

  —Theodore White, adviser to China’s Ministry of Information1

  Dean Acheson was born on April 11, 1893, in the brick rectory of Holy Trinity Church in Middletown, Connecticut, where his father, Bishop Acheson, was rector. As a boy, Acheson listened to his father lecture Middletown’s citizens on right and wrong. Over time, he developed a self-righteousness that would inform his life and career. Once, in a heated argument, Acheson called his father a fool, and Bishop Acheson kicked Dean out of the house for one year. Eventually Bishop Acheson seemed to forgive his son, but Dean never apologized for the insult. When he later wrote his memoirs, the younger man made no mention of the episode. Dean Acheson was not one to admit mistakes.

  Young Dean Acheson had many reasons to believe he existed above most mere mortals. Acheson attended the elite Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, where he studied Latin, mathematics, physics, chemistry, Greek, Roman, and European and U.S. history. Like fellow Groton alumnus Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Acheson learned a tremendous amount about a tiny part of the earth—Europe—and virtually nothing about Asia.2

  Dean Acheson and Felix Frankfurter. Acheson was one of Frankfurter’s Harvard Hotdogs—both men admired the First Wise Man, Henry Stimson—and Acheson would go on to become the leader of the Wise Men. (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  Felix Frankfurter recognized Acheson’s brilliance at Harvard Law School and recommended him to Roosevelt, who appointed Acheson undersecretary of the treasury on May 19, 1933. Acheson agreed to serve Roosevelt but was determined not to be servile:

  The President could relax over his poker parties and enjoy Tom Corcoran’s accordion, he could and did call everyone from his valet to the Secretary of State by his first name and often made up Damon Runyon nicknames for them, too—“Tommy the Cork,” “Henry the Morgue,” and similar names; he could charm an individual or a nation. But he condescended. Many reveled in apparent admission to an inner circle. I did not… to me it was patronizing and humiliating.3

  When Secretary of the Treasury William Woodin fell ill, Acheson found himself acting secretary. The strong-willed and overconfident Acheson soon clashed with Roosevelt. (“My attitude toward the President,” Acheson wrote, “was one of admiration without affection.”4) He resigned in a huff and returned to his legal practice. As with his father, Acheson never apologized. And, like Bishop Acheson, Roosevelt seemed to forgive the younger man. Frankfurter kept Acheson’s name in front of FDR, and from time to time Acheson lent his legal skills to the Roosevelt administration. Acheson had a strong bond with Henry Morgenthau, who had succeeded him as secretary of the treasury and whom Acheson admired as a true Washington Warrior:

  Henry Morgenthau was the most dynamic character in Washington; he had passion. His description of the kind of man he wanted hired was: “Does he want to lick this fellow Hitler… that is what I want to know.… Does he hate Hitler’s guts?” Henry did.5

  Like Morgenthau, Acheson bought the First Wise Man’s China Lobby line that the U.S. could embargo Japan with no repercussions. He also agreed that a few Wise Men should control U.S. foreign policy, that transparent democracy was fine for domestic matters but secrecy was vital in the conduct of foreign affairs.

  On February 1, 1941, Frankfurter looked on as his fellow Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis swore Acheson in as undersecretary of state for economic affairs. (Morgenthau had probably suggested to FDR that he appoint Acheson under Hull to put some spine in the State Department.) Morgenthau, Stimson, Knox, and Ickes now had a kindred spirit within State. Wrote John Morton Blum, author of From the Morgenthau Diaries, “There was no one at the State Department with whom [Morgenthau] could talk candidly except for Dean Acheson.”6 It went both ways. Recalled Acheson, “There was no one at all with whom I could talk—sympathetically. From top to bottom our Department, except for our corner of it, was against Henry Morgenthau’s campaign to apply freezing controls to axis countries and their victims.”7

  Acheson was a fighter who believed that “by the spring of 1941 the American people were ready for a stronger lead toward intervention.” He chafed at Secretary Hull’s deliberate pace, deciding, “What was most often needed was not compromise but decision.” Acheson complained that Hull was “slow, circuitous, cautious—concentrated on a central political purpose, the freeing of international trade from tariff and other restrictions as the prerequisite to peace and economic development.” He ridiculed in writing Hull’s oft-repeated goal of “mutually beneficial reciprocal trade agreements” by making fun of Hull’s speech impediment: “wecipwocal twade aqueements.” And Acheson dismissed Roosevelt’s decision-making ability: “Unfortunately, the capacity to decide does not descend in Pentecostal fashion upon every occupant of the White House.”8

  President Roosevelt thrived on intrigue and secrecy, and in 1941 he enjoyed plenty of both. FDR was enthusiastic about communicating with Chiang and Mayling through their secret code and was soon having confidential chats with them. Ambassador Clarence Gauss complained to Hull and pleaded for “normal diplomatic channels of communication,” pointing out that “no Ambassador to China can function intelligently and efficiently under present conditions without some background on what is transpiring through other than the usual diplomatic channels.”9

  Hull asked Currie to have “messages which he sends to officials in Chungking pass through the hands of our own Ambassador.”10 Currie agreed to report regularly to the State Department. Finally Hull succeeded in stopping FDR’s back-channel discussions. (Currie wrote Mayling that Roosevelt “would communicate more frequently directly with me if it were not for the very understandable resistance of the State Department.”)11 History will never know how many secret conversations occurred or what Roosevelt promised.

  Another of FDR’s intrigues in the spring of 1941 was the clandestine air force he was arranging for Chiang. Purchasing and then shipping fighter planes from the U.S. to the receiving docks in Rangoon, Burma, was relatively easy to manage and keep secret. Roosevelt was much more concerned that he might be held responsible for creating a corps of American mercenaries. Remembered Corcoran, “Roosevelt was troubled by the soiled label that Chennault�
�s irregulars might wear.” Tommy showed FDR a British martial poem called “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” about the first 160,000 English soldiers to die in World War I; they were called mercenaries because, unlike the draftees that followed them, they were a paid prewar army. Corcoran wrote that Roosevelt “was moved by the poem’s wisdom. It bolstered his determination to act.”12 Tommy and the Skipper cooked up a scheme that utilized private front companies to recruit and pay American pilots outside of government channels (a process the CIA would later call sheep-dipping). U.S. Army pilots and airmen would “resign” from the service and then sign private contracts with CAMCO, Ailing Soong’s company.

  Roosevelt asked Lauchlin Currie to take Chennault to the War Department to pitch his plan to the head of the U.S. Army Air Corps, General Henry “Hap” Arnold. FDR might have assumed that the presence of Currie, a top presidential assistant, would influence Arnold, but in the 1930s the general had been in the forefront of those who ousted Chennault, and he wanted nothing to do with FDR’s secret mercenary effort. Currie and Chennault next knocked at the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics and spoke to Rear Admiral John Towers, who also turned his back on FDR’s half-baked air-war scheme.

  Having been rejected by his uniformed military, Roosevelt turned to Corcoran, who approached the military’s two civilian bosses, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox. Tommy told them what the president wanted. In the end, Currie had to draw up a formal presidential directive ordering Stimson and Knox to release pilots from their military service: