They wanted me to send in about five million Americans to rescue him [Chiang], but I wouldn’t do it.… He was as corrupt as they come. I wasn’t going to waste one single American life to save him.… They hooted and hollered and carried on and said I was soft on Communism… [but] I never changed my mind about Chiang and his gang. Every damn one of them ought to be in jail, and I’d like to live to see the day they are.17
In The Last Empress, Hannah Pakula wrote, “Most people assumed that Madame Chiang, having failed to get U.S. support, would turn around and go home, but she had another plan, involving settling down in the United States and strengthening the China Lobby, which she apparently believed to be at least partially responsible for the abrupt end to the country’s generosity.”18 Mayling held meetings to pressure the U.S. government into reviving its support for Chiang. Wrote Pakula, “The Republicans took on the fight against the Communists as a moral cause; the military men were concerned about a future conflict with the USSR; and the churchmen embraced it as a struggle against the Antichrist in Asia.”19
In 1948 Henry Stimson published his autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War, coauthored by McGeorge Bundy, a young Harvard Wise Man. Unlike a mere mortal, who refers to him- or herself with the first-person pronoun I, the First Wise Man employed the third-person: “Stimson said… Stimson felt.” Curiously, he did not mention his years of service as honorary chairman of the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, through which position he so successfully convinced the majority of Americans that the U.S. could embargo Japan’s oil and suffer no blowback. He also didn’t mention the creation of a secret air force for Chiang Kai-shek or Dean Acheson’s cutting off Japan’s oil when Roosevelt was out of town. And while he devoted four pages to Army/Navy football games, the First Wise Man made no mention of the twentieth century’s most successful revolutionary, Mao Zedong.
After its defeat, Japan was forced to return Taiwan (then commonly called Formosa) to China, and with American help, Chiang Kai-shek dispatched troops there to take over. Locals recently freed from Japan’s yoke were quickly disillusioned: Chiang’s officials took the best houses and over 90 percent of the important industries, and they replaced Taiwanese workers with mainlanders. Soon, Chiang’s Taiwanese economy was in the same sorry shape as his Chinese one.
Beginning in 1947, local Taiwanese began to rebel against the heavy-handedness of Chiang’s carpetbagging officials. Chiang’s troops—mainland Chinese—flooded the streets. Bodies showing signs of gruesome torture soon lined the roadsides; many men had been castrated and had had their noses and ears sliced off.
In January of 1949, Chiang realized the game was up in mainland China, and he prepared to flee. But first he made a stop in Shanghai to transfer the government’s gold reserves to Taiwan, an operation that took place late one February night after Chiang’s soldiers had cordoned off the Bund, Shanghai’s Wall Street. A file of coolies with bamboo poles across their backs balanced wrapped packages of gold bullion as Chiang absconded with the small portion of China’s gold wealth that Ailing Soong had not yet extracted.
In her book Shanghai, Stella Dong wrote, “Chiang Kai-shek’s henchmen made Shanghai’s last weeks under Nationalist rule a nightmare of disorder and brutality.” One American witnessed “the street execution of half a dozen captive students. Bound and kneeling, they had their brains blown out by Chiang’s warriors before a great crowd of people.”20
The ultimate incarnation of the China mirage was the American fantasy that Chiang’s island of Taiwan was now the Republic of China. No one would ever recognize Bermuda as the seat of the British Empire, but with hardly the blink of an eye, Americans accepted that a tiny rock in the Pacific was now the rightful inheritor of a five-thousand-year-old legacy and that a few tens of millions on an island were the real Chinese, while the Five Hundred Million on the mainland were not.
Millions of American believers in the coming of a Christianized New China were shocked when the godless Mao Zedong stood triumphantly overlooking Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, and announced his rule from the Son of Heaven’s traditional home. Standing near him was Chingling Soong, whose presence as Sun Yat-sen’s widow added luster to Mao’s claim on the Mandate of Heaven. After a century of his country’s humiliation by foreign powers, Mao proclaimed that China would “never again be an insulted nation” now that the Chinese people had “stood up.”21
For generations Americans had funneled a river of money from their collection plates across the Pacific to China as Time, Life, and Fortune magazines assured readers that China was about to come America’s way. The United States had invested more money in backing Chiang than it had in developing the atom bomb. Then, just like that, China had been taken over by a pagan Communist who had recently been living in a cave.
Mao Zedong, Tiananmen Square, 1949 (Everett Collection / Mondadori Portfolio)
Americans felt they had lost China, but they hadn’t felt they’d lost anything when Russia had gone Communist. Then again, the Russian Orthodox Church did not have a direct connection to millions of American hearts the way the Protestant missionaries writing their fictions from China had, and there had been no Russia Lobby sloshing money into Washington’s trough. Through the China Lobby’s constant efforts, Chiang and Mayling had become the ultimate Noble Chinese Peasants. In contrast, few Americans knew of the Romanov family or cared when they were shot. Russia had never been considered America’s, so it couldn’t be lost. But the mirage held that China was destined to follow the American way, so America had now lost China.
When Mao Zedong claimed the Mandate, the chief Wise Man—Secretary of State Acheson—saw him as not a “real” Chinese, but as Moscow’s puppet, writing, “The Communist leaders have foresworn their Chinese heritage and have publicly announced their subservience to a foreign power, Russia.”22
Who lost China? Hell, someone must have; perhaps a Benedict Arnold—or a bunch of them. The Republicans taunted the Truman administration: “Stupidity at the top. Treason just below.”23
Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was sworn in as a United States senator on January 3, 1947. In Washington, he was a bachelor far from home. Sometimes on Friday afternoons, McCarthy would take a taxi from his office to the airport, where a Kennedy family private plane would whisk him and Congressman John F. Kennedy to Hyannis Port for the weekend. As a frequent guest, McCarthy played touch football with Jack, Bobby, and Teddy, and he fancied Eunice. (His wedding present to Eunice Kennedy and R. Sargent Shriver was a silver cigarette box on which he had had inscribed, To Eunice and Bob. From the one who lost. Joe McCarthy.)24 Catholic and conservative, Joe McCarthy, a young man on the make, listened attentively as the rich, Catholic, and conservative Joe Kennedy explained his strategy of accusing the Truman administration of losing China.
On January 30, 1949, thirty-one-year-old Representative Jack Kennedy foreshadowed McCarthyism in a speech in Salem, Massachusetts. In a city known for past witch hunts, Kennedy said,
We almost knowingly entered into combat with Japan to preserve the independence of China.… Contrast this policy… to the confused and vacillating policy which we have followed since that day.… This is the tragic story of China, whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men had saved, our diplomats and our President have frittered away.…
Our relationship with China since the end of the Second World War has been a tragic one, and it is of the utmost importance that we search out those who must bear the responsibility for our present predicament.… The chief opposition to the accomplishment of our mission came from the American career diplomats, the embassy at Chungking, and the Chinese and Far Eastern divisions of the State Department.25
One year later, on February 9, 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy addressed a Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.… As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “Whe
n a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.…”
It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this Nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in Government we can give.
This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been the worst.…
When Chiang Kai-shek was fighting our war, the State Department had in China a young man named John S. Service. His task, obviously, was not to work for the communization of China. Strangely, however, he sent official reports back to the State Department urging that we torpedo our ally Chiang Kai-shek—and stating, in effect, that communism was the best hope of China.
Later, this man—John Service… was picked up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for turning over to the Communists secret State Department information. Strangely, however, he was never prosecuted.… This man… was not only reinstated in the State Department but promoted.…
This, ladies and gentlemen, gives you somewhat of a picture of the type of individuals who have been helping to shape our foreign policy. In my opinion, the State Department, which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with Communists.
I have here in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.26
Two weeks later, on April 30, the New York Times asked, “Who’s feeding McCarthy his stuff?” The paper concluded, “That such a thing as a ‘China Lobby’ exists is indisputable in the minds of most observers… [it is] a loose conglomeration of persons and organizations which for various reasons are interested in China.” The China Lobby drew its strength from people “who passionately believe American policy to be wrong; who think that American withdrawal from China has caused a needless and dangerous break in the dike against the spread of communism.”27 At the time, no one reflected that the China Lobby first took root during the flowering of the T. V. Soong–Franklin Roosevelt relationship in the early 1930s, and few were aware of how the lobby had manipulated FDR’s blunder into the Pacific war and Truman’s nonrecognition of Mao.
Senator McCarthy defended his sensational accusations for the first time in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. McCarthy’s fearmongering focused on who lost China: “Communists and queers have sold 400 million Asiatic people into atheistic slavery and they now have the American people in a hypnotic trance, headed blindly toward the same precipice.”28
John Service, John Davies, and John Carter Vincent had accurately predicted that Mao Zedong would rise and Chiang Kai-shek would fall, in direct contradiction to Americans’ long-held belief in the coming of an Americanized and Christianized New China. After McCarthy’s blasts, the State Department fired Service, Davies, and Vincent.
David Halberstam recounted how Henry Luce also served the China Lobby’s interests during the McCarthy period:
Luce allowed McCarthyism to take place, he created a vacuum in which the misinterpretation of events led to conspiracy theories. He had no sympathy for those men who had been right and were about to be sacrificed to the witch-hunters.… His publications formed a major obstacle to anyone trying to restore any reality to American Asian policy. He never really recognized Communist China and never accepted the verdict of history. At a personal level this might have been admirable—Harry Luce had not betrayed old friends, he had honored his father’s memory—but at a journalistic level it was intensely dangerous. He was unbending. In the pages of Time Chiang had never slipped from power and never slipped from grace.29
In 1986 Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas coauthored a book entitled The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, about Henry Stimson’s ideological descendants, the officials most responsible for the creation of the post–World War II national security state. The six Wise Men were Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, Averell Harriman, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, and John McCloy, all of whom had served one or more U.S. presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson and who first coalesced as a group under Harry Truman. Truman relied upon the Wise Men for foreign policy advice, and they became the architects of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and Cold War containment policy.
Isaacson and Thomas’s book deals mostly with how the Wise Men contained the Soviet Union in Europe. Left out of their tale is the disastrous course the Wise Men pursued in Asia.
It began in what some refer to as the Age of Acheson, when, as undersecretary and then later secretary of state, Acheson influenced decision-making. “I had a constituency of one,” Acheson said of his close relationship with President Harry Truman.30 In his living room Acheson displayed a photo of Henry Stimson.31 Acheson’s age would see the official who had thrust the U.S. into World War II lead the country into unnecessary wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Korea—due to its location—was the crucial keystone in North Asia. It was Japan’s occupation of Korea that had allowed it to invade China. On August 10, 1945—the day after the second atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki—Wise Man John McCloy divided Korea for the purposes of accepting the surrender of Japanese troops. He drew an imaginary line at the thirty-eighth parallel. Above the parallel would be a new country called North Korea dominated by Russia; below it would be the U.S. ally South Korea. No Wise Man thought to consult the Korean people about this division of their ancient land.
Koreans were even more outraged to learn that U.S. officials would govern South Korea with help from the Koreans’ former Japanese colonial masters. North Koreans watched uneasily as South Koreans who had cooperated with the Japanese occupation now helped the United States gain influence on the Korean Peninsula. Koreans had just suffered forty years of Nazi-like domination by the Japanese. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung had begun his military career fighting the Japanese in the spring of 1932, and his government was first of all, and above all else, anti-Japanese.
A major concern of Dean Acheson’s was reinvigorating the world economy after the devastation of World War II. In Europe, the U.S. would adopt a program of economic aid called the Marshall Plan; in Asia, it was known as the Policy for Asia, National Security Council document 48/2. According to NSC-48/2, Japan would become Asia’s industrial economy, fired by U.S. companies. Washington would “connect up” other Asian economies to Japan’s and keep them in subservient roles as suppliers to Japan’s industrial machine and as markets for Japanese goods (thus isolating and containing China).32 The Wise Men opposed the industrialization of the rest of Asia, the former and current colonies of Japan, the UK, Holland, the U.S., and France. Instead, their plan called for Korea, Vietnam, and other Asian countries to be the supply/consumption machines within the U.S.-Japanese orbit. The American military would provide an umbrella of security for Japan and keep the other Asian countries in line.
The Wise Men didn’t understand that their Policy for Asia looked to many Asians alarmingly like imperial Japan’s recent attempts at empire. To them, it was as if the U.S. was green-lighting another era of Japanese dominance with American backing. When North Korean leaders realized that Washington wanted Japan to once again dominate Korea, they perceived a mortal threat.
The Wise Men’s Policy for Asia was a blueprint for American disaster in post–World War II Asia, as it called for the U.S. military to enforce the Japan-centric model, a “for us or against us” policy designed to contain Mao Zedong. Bruce Cumings, one of the leading historians on Korea, wrote about the Policy for Asia, “The United States would now do something utterly unimagined at the end of World War II: it would prepare to intervene militarily against anti-colonial movements in East Asia—first Korea, then Vietnam, with the Chinese revolution as the towering backdro
p.”33
In Korea, the two sides skirmished, each repeatedly violating the other’s borders. Acheson testified in secret to the Senate that the U.S. had drawn a line of containment in Korea and asked for funding to turn back Communism there. However, Congress and the Pentagon balked at spending Acheson’s requested $600 million for Korea, which seemed too high compared to the $225 million for containment in Greece and Turkey that Congress had approved.
Dean Acheson published his memoir Present at the Creation in 1969. The title referred to the birth of the modern U.S. state, which he had done so much to midwife. Acheson recounts the founding of the CIA, the Defense Department, the NSA, the World Bank, and other organizations. But in his Pulitzer Prize–winning tome, the aging Wise Man didn’t mention perhaps his biggest contribution to modern America: the secret policy that he as secretary of state had inspired and that reoriented the United States, changing it from a robust democracy with a small professional military into the militarized national security state it had become by the time he published his book. Acheson’s fateful 1950 policy document was still classified top secret in 1969.
In 1950, despite the Marshall Plan and the Policy for Asia attempts at stimulating the global economy, the Wise Men saw that Germany and Japan were still not performing adequately, thus threatening to slow growth in the United States. Acheson analyzed the U.S. economy during World War II, when massive production of armaments for use around the world had provided a powerful stimulus. A good friend of English economist John Maynard Keynes, Acheson wondered if a huge Keynesian expansion of U.S. military spending could prime the worldwide pump.
Acheson’s top secret policy was laid out in National Security Council document 68, or NSC-68, which called for something new in American history: an enormous U.S. military encircling the globe to protect the “war-making capabilities” of its allies, a euphemism referring to countries with resources that American industry needed to manufacture arms to contain Communism worldwide. The Constitution was written by men who feared the corrosive effects of a large standing army under a powerful executive, but with NSC-68, Acheson was tilting government funds away from domestic programs and toward a military stimulus.
The China Mirage Page 32