Tuchman wrote that Roosevelt’s wartime policy toward China
was not made in terms of current information but in terms of the accumulated notions of a lifetime by which minds had already been formed… information coming from the field had to battle against this accumulated weight.46
Chiang convinced Hurley that Stilwell had to go, and Hurley endorsed Chiang’s request in a cable to FDR, who fired Stilwell. The news hit the China Hands like a bomb. John Service wrote, “Our dealings with Chiang Kai-shek apparently continue on the unrealistic assumption that he is China and he is necessary to our cause.… We should end the hollow pretense that China is unified and that we can only talk to Chiang.… This puts the trump card in Chiang’s hands… more than ever, we hold all the aces in Chiang’s poker game. It is time we started playing them.”47
Instead, Roosevelt put the cards in Hurley’s hands by naming him the new ambassador to China.
John Service traveled from Chungking to Washington in November of 1944. Washington officials were largely ignorant about Mao Zedong’s successes and Service told them about Mao’s rescues of downed American aircrews and his eagerness to cooperate with the United States in the war effort against Japan and in rebuilding China afterward. Service also reported Mao’s concern that if the United States continued to arm only Chiang, the Generalissimo would launch another civil war when Japan was defeated, a contest that Chiang couldn’t win. Service shared his observations with officials and journalists. He lunched with Henry Luce, who sat stone-faced. “I made no effect on Luce at all,” Service remembered.48
Service also briefed Harry Hopkins, who had earlier read some of the China Hands’ reports and passed them on to FDR. Hopkins’s White House office was, Service recalled, “a plain small basement room not much larger than the cluttered desk.” Before Service left Yan’an, Mao’s men had given him a map showing their expanding empire and demonstrating how Mao could assist with a U.S. military landing on China’s Pacific coast. Service spread out Mao’s map on Hopkins’s office floor and the two men got down on their knees to examine it. Service pointed out Mao-controlled areas, his guerrilla bases behind Japanese lines, sites of key Japanese troop concentrations, escape routes for downed American fliers, and potential landing areas for U.S. troops. For forty-five minutes, Service—the U.S. official who knew Mao best—tried to break through to Hopkins, saying that Mao’s men were not Russian stooges and that they desired cooperation with the U.S. But Hopkins’s laconic conclusion demonstrated that China Lobby messaging was stronger than Service’s presentation of reality. Hopkins said, “Very interesting, I have no doubt that the picture you give is largely correct, but the only Chinese that most Americans have ever heard of is Chiang Kai-shek.” As for Mao and his millions, “They call themselves Communists.”49 The discussion was over.
Perhaps Service—who had been born in China, was fluent in the language, and had spent most of his adult life there—did not understand the China mirage’s hold on stateside Americans’ minds. One U.S. official warned him that speaking the truth about China in Washington was dangerous: “Jesus, Service! I read that thing of yours, and I certainly agree with you but it is going to get you in a lot of trouble.”50
Ambassador Hurley never came close to comprehending that Mao was China’s future. Instead, he likened the Chiang-Mao fight to the tussles between Democrats and Republicans in his native Oklahoma. In Yan’an, Hurley had presented himself to Mao as a neutral negotiator, but it soon became apparent that Hurley was the Generalissimo’s errand boy. Mao was surprised that FDR’s top man in China was so deep in Chiang’s pocket, but he continued to speak of his desire to cooperate with the United States and have Roosevelt arm him against the Japanese.
Mao Zedong, Ambassador Patrick Hurley, and Chiang Kai-shek. Hurley called Mao “Moose Dung,” Mao called Hurley “the Clown,” and Chiang appreciated Hurley’s lack of knowledge about China. (Jack Wilkes / Getty Images)
In a report to the State Department, John Davies—who, like John Service, was in and out of Yan’an during 1944 and 1945—tried again to awaken Washington to the opportunity slipping through its fingers:
The United States is the greatest hope and the greatest fear of the Chinese Communists. They recognize that if they receive American aid, even if only on an equal basis with Chiang, they can quickly establish control over most if not all of China, perhaps without civil war. For most of Chiang’s troops and bureaucrats are opportunists who will desert the Generalissimo if the Communists appear to be stronger than the Central Government.
We are the greatest fear of the Communists because the more aid we give Chiang exclusively the greater the likelihood of his precipitating a civil war and the more protracted and costly will be the communist unification of China.
So the Chinese Communists watch us with mixed feelings. If we continue to reject them and support an unreconstructed Chiang, they see us becoming their enemy. But they would prefer to be friends… the Communists are in China to stay. And China’s destiny is not Chiang’s but theirs.51
On January 9, 1945, concerned that the truth was not getting through, Mao reached out from Yan’an to President Roosevelt in Washington. Major Ray Cromley—acting chief of the U.S. mission in Yan’an—forwarded this message to U.S. Army headquarters in Chungking: “Mao and Zhou will be immediately available either singly or together for exploratory conference at Washington should President Roosevelt express desire to receive them at White House as leaders of a primary Chinese party.”52
Before Cromley sent it, Zhou Enlai had warned, “Hurley must not get this information, as I don’t trust his discretion.”53 Unknown for decades was that U.S. Navy technicians led by Captain Michael Miles intercepted and decoded the message sent to Chungking and shared it with Dai Li, the head of Chiang’s gestapo. Miles and Li rewrote the memo to make it appear that Mao was attempting to discredit Hurley in FDR’s eyes.54
On January 14, Hurley buried Mao’s invitation deep in a turgid thirteen-page cable to the White House, saying that he had been delayed by a plot hatched “within our own ranks” to undermine his efforts at a Chiang-Mao reconciliation. If Hurley had not heroically discovered this plot, “it would be futile for us to try to save the National Government of China.” All would soon be well in China, Hurley assured FDR; he was fully in charge, and Chiang and T. V. Soong were “now favorable to unification… and agreement with the Communists,” and after Hurley’s negotiations succeeded, Roosevelt could meet with both Chiang and Mao. In the meantime Hurley urged FDR to get Churchill’s and Stalin’s approval for “your plan for… a post-war free, unified democratic China.”55
Dai Li also gave Ambassador Hurley fabricated accounts of John Service’s efforts to undermine him. When Service returned to Chungking from the U.S., Hurley warned him, as Service later remembered, “If I interfered with him he would break me.”56
Here are some of the great what-ifs of American-Chinese relations. FDR met with Russian Communists in the White House. What if Mao’s message had not been spiked by Chiang’s secret police and Roosevelt had met with a Chinese Communist? What if Zhou Enlai had told Roosevelt that he was being blackmailed by Chiang? What if Mao had convinced the American commander in chief that his Chinese Communist forces armed by the U.S. could succeed against the Japanese, just like Soviet Communist forces were pounding Germany? What if Mao could have told FDR about his desire to cooperate with Wall Street to industrialize China?
Historians examine Mao’s actions after he took over China in 1949 and conclude he did not want fruitful relations with the United States. But that was five years after the U.S. had refused his outstretched hand. Some still argue that he was not sincere, but the fact is that Mao made great efforts to reach out to Roosevelt, and it’s easy to believe that with Europe and Russia bleeding men and money, he would have loved to be allied with Washington and Wall Street.
A visibly ailing Roosevelt made the arduous journey to the war-ravaged Crimea to meet with Joseph Stalin and Winston Church
ill and discuss the reorganization of Europe and Asia after the war. At the Yalta Conference (February 4 to February 11, 1945), Roosevelt secretly promised Stalin that Russia could retake the Chinese territory that it had lost to Japan after the Russia-Japanese war if Stalin entered the war against Japan. Covertly doling out another country’s territory didn’t square with FDR’s Atlantic Charter, but Roosevelt hoped the Russians would absorb much of Japan’s punch, thus saving many American lives. FDR told himself that he would later straighten the whole thing out with Chiang. John Davies summed up FDR’s management of the China theater as “the inevitable result of two illusions. One was an American romantic image of China. The second was an assumption that the United States could pretty much work its will on China.”57
Mao now oversaw an empire of one hundred million, about twice the population of Britain, but FDR continued to see Chiang as China’s postwar leader and Mao as just a disaffected party. By getting Stalin and Churchill to join with the U.S. in supporting Chiang, FDR imagined that Mao would be forced to compromise and accept Chiang’s leadership. As John Service observed in 1976, “Roosevelt and Stalin strangely found that their mutually unrealistic views on China coincided.… That made inevitable a Chinese civil war in which the U.S. was hopelessly tied to the side of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. And thus was needlessly sealed the unhappy course of American-Chinese relations for the next 27 years.”58
Mao commanded a million-man army of warriors, and John Service tried to educate the U.S. military brass in China about Mao’s military might. In early February 1945, Service arranged a meeting between State Department officer Ray Ludden and General Albert Wedemeyer, who had replaced General Stilwell. Ludden had just spent four months marching with Mao’s warriors behind Japanese lines on a grueling twelve-hundred-mile winter trek from Yan’an to the outskirts of Beijing and back to Yan’an. Ludden saw enthusiastic peasant support for Mao, something he insisted could not have been “a stage setting for the deception of foreign visitors.”59 Ludden told Wedemeyer, “Popular support of the Communist armies and civil administration is a reality which must be considered in future planning.”60 General Stilwell had entertained similar ideas and he’d been fired. General Wedemeyer wrote the Joint Chiefs in Washington that Mao’s movement could be put down with relatively small assistance given to Chiang’s government.
Many important Hotdogs and Warriors continued to misread reality in China. Joe Alsop, the distant relative of FDR who cashed China Lobby checks, wrote that Americans like John Service and John Davies were “childish to assume that the Chinese Communists are anything but an appendage of the Soviet Union,” and that the idea of the U.S. using Mao’s forces was “dangerous and idiotic.” Alsop’s solution was for the U.S. to give more aid to Chiang and work with the Generalissimo to “create a strong army, and then assisting (by our own forces if necessary) in unifying the country, liquidating the Communists, and establishing a strong government.”61
At Ambassador Hurley’s and Joseph Stalin’s urging, in late January, Mao Zedong sent Zhou Enlai to Chungking to discuss terms with Chiang and Hurley. Chiang refused to share any power with Mao and threw sand in Hurley’s gears by appointing several hard-line anti-Communists to official posts. Hurley reported optimistically to FDR that negotiations were right on track.
John Service wrote privately to John Carter Vincent, director of the State Department’s Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, complaining that Hurley was clueless, that he had no grasp of the bloody history and deep mistrust between Mao and Chiang: “It is essential that we get PH [Pat Hurley] out of the chair he now holds.” Hurley was a “bull in a China shop… the antithesis in this delicate situation of what a good servant of the American government should be.… He is an idiot playing with fire. I may sound strong. But I’m not alone in thinking these things.”62
Chiang Kai-shek told Ambassador Hurley that he was worried about what Roosevelt had promised Stalin at Yalta. On February 19, 1945, in Chungking, Hurley and General Wedemeyer boarded a plane bound for Washington. In their absence, chargé d’affaires George Atcheson would run the embassy and General Mervin Gross would be the top U.S. Army officer. Atcheson and Gross agreed with Service that Hurley’s optimistic reports to FDR were misleading, that U.S. support for only Chiang would plunge China into civil war, and that Mao’s obvious popularity and strength must be acknowledged. Atcheson proposed an extraordinary manifesto to be signed by all the embassy’s political officers. He asked Service to write it and on February 28 cabled the final version to the State Department with this unusual note: “This telegram has been drafted with the assistance and agreement of all the political officers of the staff of this embassy and has been shown to General Wedemeyer’s Chief of Staff, General Gross.”
The China Hands’ cable warned that Washington was not achieving its goals against Japan, that Chiang had the U.S. over a barrel while Mao—who, in contrast, could help the U.S. defeat Japan—was becoming convinced that FDR was “committed to the support of Chiang alone.” The cable noted that if American military forces landed on China’s Pacific coast, they would need Mao’s cooperation, and it argued that Mao should be “helped by us rather than seeking Russian aid or intervention.” The China Hands suggested that FDR inform Chiang that “military necessity requires that we supply and cooperate with the Communists and other suitable groups who can assist the war against Japan.”63
After the cable was dispatched, Service confided to his mother in a letter, “We may become heroes—or we may be hung.”64
The China Hands’ cable was embraced by many in the State Department as an act of courageous truth-telling. John Carter Vincent wrote, “There should be no question of an exercise of our prerogative, dictated by military necessity, to utilize all forces in China capable of cooperating with us in the fight against Japan. Chiang, having failed to effect military unity, should now be told that he has forfeited any claim to exclusive support.”65
War Department planners were anticipating landing along the China coast preceding an invasion of Japan. Wedemeyer received secret orders to “arm any Chinese forces which they believe can be effective employed against the Japanese.”66
The State and War Departments were adjusting to reality in China, but Hurley stood firm. When John Carter Vincent showed him the cable signed by his Chungking embassy staff, Hurley exploded in rage: “I know who drafted that telegram: Service!” Hurley shouted, “I’ll get that son-of-a-bitch if it’s the last thing I do!”67
On March 9, 1945, John Service returned to Yan’an. In the summer of 1944, Americans had been Mao’s “greatest hope.” Now there was a chill in the air, and Service was told that Ambassador Hurley “had gone back on his word and had become in effect a spokesman for [Chiang]”68 and that Mao and his people would “seek friends wherever they can find them.”69 Despite having been rejected by the U.S., Mao’s men remained confident, one even patting Service on the knee and chuckling as he said, “We don’t really expect any arms from you. Ultimately we’ll get them from [Chiang] anyway.”70
Late one night Mao surprised Service by showing up for a chat that would last three hours. He had obviously thought deeply about his message, and Service’s roommate remembered that Mao was particularly animated. Mao’s message to Service was that FDR’s support of only Chiang was “not the best way to fight the war” and that his, Mao’s, policies had popular support; his warriors were aided by the masses like fish swimming in the sea. (Service noted in his report that, by contrast, for peasants in Chiang’s China, “the war meant little except the constant fear of the death sentence of conscription, steadily higher tax demands and the unending impositions of a half-starved soldiery.”71)
Mao said that Chiang was “incapable of improving the condition of China’s masses” and repeated that the United States was his choice to help rebuild China:
Between the people of China and the people of the United States there are strong ties of sympathy, understanding and mutual interest.… China’s greatest p
ostwar need is economic development. She lacks the capitalistic foundation necessary to carry this out alone.… America and China complement each other economically; they will not compete.… America is not only the most suitable country to assist this economic development of China, she is also the only country fully able to participate. For all these reasons there must not and cannot be any conflict, estrangement or misunderstanding between the Chinese people and America.…72
When attacked, we will fight back. We are not afraid of the outcome because the people are with us. The Japanese haven’t been able to wipe out the liberated areas; how can Chiang’s conscripted un-indoctrinated army of unwilling peasants? Chiang could not whip us during the civil war when we were a hundred times weaker.73
Service concluded in his report that if the U.S. continued to exclude Mao and support only Chiang, “Disunity will be stimulated and the consequences will be disastrous.”74
The State Department forwarded the China Hands’ manifesto to the White House, but history doesn’t reveal if FDR considered it. Roosevelt’s health was failing. When he appeared before a joint session of Congress on March 1 to report the Yalta agreement, observers were surprised to see the diminished president seated in his wheelchair, the first time he had done so when addressing Congress. Roosevelt explained, “I have just completed a fourteen thousand mile trip.”75 When FDR met with Vice President Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s hands shook so much that he could not drink a cup of coffee without spilling it. General Wedemeyer recorded his thoughts after a meeting in the White House: “I had not seen the President for several months and was shocked at his physical appearance. His color was ashen, his face drawn, and his jaw drooping. I had difficulty in conveying information to him because he seemed in a daze. Several times I repeated the same idea because his mind did not seem to retain or register.”76
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