The exhausted and rapidly declining president met with Hurley several times to decide American policy toward China. Neither man took notes, and Hurley later gave contradictory descriptions of what transpired. Apparently the ever clueless and optimistic Hurley reassured the failing FDR that, yes, the president’s long-held dream of a “unified, democratic China” was just around the corner, because with pressure from Washington, London, and Moscow, Mao would be forced to join Chiang’s government. Years later, John Service observed:
One may wonder… how thoroughly Roosevelt was briefed, and how clearly he understood the dispute over American policy in China as Hurley was representing it.… Nonetheless, Roosevelt was astute enough as a politician to be keenly aware that China policy was a sensitive subject, that Chiang Kai-shek had a large and fervent band of American supporters and that “Communist” was a dirty word to important segments of American opinion.77
Thus in the warmth of the Oval Office, the decision that would ruin America’s relationship with China for a generation was made: China would be changed by outside forces—the U.S., the USSR, and the UK—and Chiang would be their vehicle. The China Hands warned that no amount of money and equipment could save Chiang, but in America, Time magazine had not produced a single cover with Mao’s face. Courtesy of the China Lobby, Southern Methodist Chiang and the Christian Miss Soong were the only Chinese most Americans knew. In China, the Mandate had already passed on to Mao, but the merchant-missionary dream was just too strong for Warren Delano’s grandson to resist.
On March 29, 1945, Roosevelt went to the Little White House at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he played a secret right hand/left hand game in his personal life. Portrait artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff journeyed there with her friend Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, Roosevelt’s current mistress. On the afternoon of April 12, Roosevelt was sitting for Shoumatoff with Lucy by his side when he suddenly exclaimed, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.”78 He slumped forward in his chair, unconscious, and was carried into his bedroom. Shoumatoff and Rutherfurd rushed away. Roosevelt died at 3:35 p.m. Eleanor went to Warm Springs to claim his body, and she learned about Lucy and that her daughter, Anna, had for some time been the communications link between FDR and his last mistress.
The idea that the United States would nurture and change China has deep roots in America. (B. A. Garside, Box No. 11, Accession No. 80054-14.12. Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University)
One of Roosevelt’s final acts had been to follow the China Lobby and sanction Chiang as China’s future, ignoring the China Hands’ plea that he recognize Mao’s growing influence. If Roosevelt hadn’t propped up the faltering Soong-Chiang syndicate, a Chinese civil war might have been avoided and Mao Zedong might have claimed the Mandate earlier than 1949. Instead, the American belief that China would change according to the U.S. plan would flourish for a few more years, resulting in the deaths of millions of people. But the tide of Chinese history would soon overwhelm barbarian dreams. When Ambassador Hurley later briefed Winston Churchill on Roosevelt’s plan for a united, democratic China under Chiang, the prime minister referred to FDR’s thinking as “the Great American illusion.”79
Chapter 12
WHO LOST CHINA?
Who lost China?
—Senator Joseph McCarthy1
I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.
—President Lyndon Baines Johnson2
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI career was rooted in the Red Scare of the 1920s. Since then he had kept an eagle eye out for isms to exploit, especially the evil of Communism. Hoover was a big fan of Chiang Kai-shek as well as a China Lobby insider and a friend of Patrick Hurley.
When Amerasia magazine editor Philip Jaffe, whom Hoover suspected of Communist leanings, came to DC, Hoover illegally bugged his hotel room. John Service was in Washington, and at the direction of Lauchlin Currie, he was giving background briefings to journalists, a common practice for U.S. government officials. At six o’clock at night on April 19, 1945, Service walked into Jaffe’s hotel room, and the FBI listened as Service told Jaffe he would give him some relatively innocuous documents about Chiang and Mao. Hoover swung into action. FBI agents searched Service’s State Department office and decided that there was something suspicious about his writings about Chinese Communists—even though these were the people he was paid to keep tabs on. They knocked on Service’s door at 5:03 on a June night: “We’re from the F.B.I. You’re under arrest.”3 Ambassador Hurley had his first son of a bitch. The China Lobby went into overdrive. Service was dragged into court and eventually subjected to seven State Department investigations, but each inquiry concluded that Service was innocent and had caused no harm.4
Mao was upset over Service’s arrest. He dashed off an editorial to his followers accusing Ambassador Hurley of not being an honest broker and warned that if the U.S. continued to support only Chiang Kai-shek, America would cause a Chinese civil war after the Japanese were defeated.
The U.S. military brought Japan to its knees by burning out its cities with napalm. General Curtis LeMay was one of the great pilots of the European front. Assigned to bomb Japan, LeMay traveled to China and saw that, contrary to Chiang and Chennault’s preachings, China wasn’t a secure site from which to launch air attacks on Japan. LeMay instead based his B-52s on the Pacific islands of Tinian, Saipan, and Guam. Indeed, the battle of Iwo Jima was fought to clear the middle airspace between these southern airfields and Japan, far to the north. On March 11, 1945, American B-52s with bellies full of napalm flew over Iwo Jima, headed north. LeMay launched the biggest air attack in history against Tokyo, killing around one hundred thousand civilians in about three hours. More Tokyo civilians died in a shorter time than in any previous military operation in any war. As LeMay later wrote, “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9–10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”5 LeMay exaggerated a bit, but his point was that the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki later overshadowed the powerful role of his groundbreaking napalm bombings, which reduced the majority of Japan’s cities to ash and made an astonishing fifteen million urban Japanese homeless.6
At 7:00 p.m. on August 14, 1945, President Truman announced the Japanese surrender. Three hours later, Mayling Soong came on the air, broadcasting from Ailing’s Riverdale mansion: “Now that complete victory has come to us, our thoughts should turn first to the rendering of thanks to our creator and the sobering task of formulating a truly Christian peace.”7
At the time of Tokyo’s surrender, the majority of Japanese troops in China were stationed in the north. This was Chairman Mao’s territory.
In Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower negotiated with Russian Communists over who would accept which German prisoners. While military reality in Asia dictated that Mao had the quickest, cheapest, and most effective way to disarm the Japanese soldiers, General MacArthur ordered the Japanese to surrender only to Chiang. Since many of Chiang’s troops were far away in southern China, Mao watched, astonished, as the U.S. mounted a massive cross-country airlift of the Generalissimo’s soldiers. Equally astonishing to Mao, Truman inserted American troops into North China to protect railways and other strategic resources for Chiang and ordered them to treat as enemies Mao’s warriors, men who had previously risked their lives to rescue downed U.S. fliers. Now there were no American observers in Yan’an, and having had his outreached hand swatted away a number of times, Mao concluded the obvious, that the United States had rejected his attempts at friendship.
Earlier in the year, John Service had tried to inform Washington about Mao Zedong. Now another young American attempted to awaken Harry Truman’s Wise Men to the rise of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the anti-French Vietminh freedom fighters. In the spring of 1945, thirty-one-year-old Captain Archimedes Patti of the OSS parachuted into Ho Chi Minh’s base north of Hanoi. Patti spoke French flue
ntly, and Ho liked to smoke Patti’s Chesterfields. Patti was an intelligent and canny operative, and he interviewed the French colonizers and many French-speaking Vietnamese. Indeed, over several months, Patti spent hours in conversation with Ho Chi Minh.
On September 2, 1945, General MacArthur took the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. To an international radio audience, MacArthur promised that the defeat of Japan had liberated Asia.
On that same day, four hundred thousand joyful Vietnamese gathered in Hanoi’s central square. The vast crowd strained to see the diminutive fifty-five-year-old Ho Chi Minh as he walked across the enormous stage, stepped up to the microphone, and proclaimed,
All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.8
Quoting Thomas Jefferson in Vietnam’s declaration of independence was a pretty broad hint that Ho Chi Minh desired friendship with the United States. Captain Patti and other American OSS officers stood nearby as Ho told the world that Vietnamese, and not foreigners, would now control Vietnam. Americans on the spot admired Ho and could see that the future was his. Patti wrote reports to Washington concluding that Ho Chi Minh had both widespread popular support and a potent plan to repel invaders. Julia Child—later America’s TV chef—was the young OSS secretary who wrapped Patti’s reports in burlap for their long journey to Washington.
As Mao Zedong had, Ho Chi Minh extended his hand in friendship to the United States, sending a number of entreaties to President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson along the lines of this one: “I therefore most earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people to interfere urgently in support of our independence.”9 Neither Truman nor Acheson responded.
This was not an oversight. The Wise Men disagreed about whether Asians should be free. America’s defeat of Japan did not result in liberty for Asians. On President Truman’s orders, the U.S. Navy ferried British, Dutch, and French government officials and military men back to Southeast Asia to reassert control of their colonies. The merchant-missionary dream that foreigners would control events in Asia was still alive.
After the failure of the Chiang-Chennault air-war dream, Generals Marshall and Arnold had given Chennault the boot. Chennault left China on August 8, 1945. (Since he had contributed so little to Japan’s defeat, no one in the War Department asked him to attend the victory celebration in Tokyo Bay.) Nevertheless, Chennault—who had now been drummed out of the U.S. military twice—would continue to spin the mirage in Washington, and with Tommy the Cork and the Soong family, he would make his postwar fortune in Asia through the private airline they founded, China Air Transport (CAT).
China Air Transport was an airline with few customers; most Chinese couldn’t afford a plane ticket. No matter—Corcoran solved CAT’s cash-flow problem. Tommy’s old friend Fiorello La Guardia, former mayor of New York, was in 1945 the director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Tommy presented La Guardia with a plan to have CAT deliver UNRRA supplies within China. UNRRA officials turned down this costly proposal. China Air Transport was an upstart airline fronted by the discredited Chennault with shadowy China Lobby ties. Tommy pressured La Guardia, who told him there was nothing he could do. Tommy kept the heat on. Just before he resigned as director general, La Guardia reversed his officials’ ruling and awarded CAT a nearly four-million-dollar UNRRA contract.
To accept UNRRA aid, Ailing and T. V. Soong created the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (CNRRA). With skids greased by the China Lobby, UNRRA gave Chiang more aid—$518 million—than it awarded any other country. This UNRRA aid passed through the hands of the Soong family, who also, through CAT, were charging the United Nations big delivery fees and splitting the take with their American friends, the same ones who in 1940 had sold Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a secret air war in Asia.
President Truman continued FDR’s policy of supporting only Chiang, and as the China Hands had predicted, civil war broke out. Many Americans were surprised because the China Lobby line held that once the Japanese left, Chiang’s America-loving New China would arise. During four years of war, FDR had promoted the Soong-Chiang myth, and Mao’s mastery was hidden under a pile of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines.
In September of 1945 an increasingly frustrated Ambassador Hurley left Chungking and returned to the comfortable mirage back home. On November 26, Hurley was in Washington and learned that six congressmen had criticized “the rotten Hurley policy” that had “now committed us to armed intervention” in China’s internal affairs.10 An infuriated Hurley responded with a letter of resignation to Truman:
It is not secret that the American policy in China did not have the support of all the career men in the State Department. The professional foreign service men sided with the Chinese Communist armed party.… Our professional diplomats continuously advised the Communists that my efforts in preventing the collapse of the National Government did not represent the policy of the United States… the chief opposition to the accomplishment of our mission came from the American career diplomats in the Embassy at Chungking and in the Chinese and Far Eastern Divisions of the State Department.11
This was the first blast of the who-lost-China fears that would later fuel McCarthyism, the witch hunt for the enemy within. Truman dispatched General Marshall to China to referee the spat between Chiang and Mao, but Marshall failed to bring peace between the two men. The China Lobby raised new suspicions about officials who were losing China: they even attacked the great General Marshall—the man who had won World War II for FDR—by accusing him of having been duped by traitors.
The U.S. military and media remained virtually clueless regarding Mao Zedong’s military strategies. In 1947, American newspapers reported as militarily significant Chiang’s capture of Yan’an and the fact that Mao was supposedly on the run. Sidney Rittenberg—an American who spent time with Mao in those years—explained:
Mao deliberately used Yan’an as bait. Then after Yan’an was occupied, he used himself as bait, personally, to lead this huge, well-trained, well-equipped—with American military equipment—this army of Chiang Kai-shek’s deep into the wilderness of Shansi province, where the population was sparse and heavily supportive of the Communists. Then he used his person to lead them on a merry chase every day until he got them into the ambush spot he wanted them in.12
By June of 1948, Mao and Chiang had roughly equal numbers of men and armaments. In October 1948, an astonishing three hundred thousand of Chiang’s soldiers defected to Mao’s side. The final showdown was near.
The China Hands had predicted that U.S. policy supporting the Generalissimo only would force Mao to turn to the Soviet Union. When Mao did exactly that, Americans believed he was a Soviet pawn, because the first assumption of the mirage was that China could not be reformed from within, only by outside Western forces. Not realizing that Mao’s first choice of an ally had been the United States, Americans saw Mao’s success as part of a worldwide Communist conspiracy emanating from Moscow.
In November of 1948 Chiang sent a “direct and urgent appeal” to Truman, warning that Mao’s warriors were “within striking distance” of Shanghai and Nanking and asking for “speedy and increased military assistance” and “a firm statement of American policy in support of the cause for which my Government is fighting.” Chiang contended that such a statement from Truman “would serve to bolster up the morale of the armed forces and the civilian population and would strengthen the Government’s position.”13 But a memorandum prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Truman there was “now obviously grave doubt as to whether the arrival in China of any further military equipment for the Chinese National Government will buy any time
at all. It might, in fact, have the opposite result in that such equipment might pass into the hands of victorious Communist forces.”14
Mayling arrived in Washington at the end of 1948 with a demand for three billion dollars in aid. Truman had Mayling cool her heels for nine days before seeing her. (Like the British, Truman referred privately to Chiang as “Generalissimo Cash My-check.”)15 Truman later remembered,
She came to the United States for some more handouts, I wouldn’t let her stay at the White House like Roosevelt did. I don’t think she liked it very much, but I didn’t care one way or the other about what she liked and what she didn’t like.…
I discovered after some time, that Chiang Kai-shek and the Madame and their families, the Soong family and the Kungs, were all thieves, every last one of them, the Madame and him included. And they stole seven hundred and fifty million dollars out of the 3.5 billion that we sent to Chiang. They stole it, and it’s invested in real estate down in Sao Paolo and some right here in New York. And that’s the money that was used and is still being used for the so-called China Lobby. I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. And I don’t want anything to do with people like that.…16
The China Mirage Page 31