The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  President Truman signed NSC-68, but at that point it was only a Wise Men’s wish list and had no congressional funding. Following U.S. tradition, Truman had drastically reduced the military’s size after World War II. In 1945 the U.S. military had more than eleven million members and a sixty-billion-dollar budget. By 1948, Truman had trimmed this to fewer than a million members and a budget of thirteen billion.

  North Korea crossed the thirty-eighth parallel in force on June 25, 1950. Cumings wrote, “The North Koreans attacked the South because of fears that Japan’s industrial economy and its former position in Korea were being revived by recent changes in American policy.”34 For many North Korean soldiers, this fighting was the continuation of their recent war against the Japanese.

  The Wise Men misinterpreted an incident in a small Asian civil war as a challenge to their global containment policy, incorrectly concluding that Moscow—working through Beijing and Pyongyang—had ordered the crossing, when it was only a North Korean action.

  By this time the China Lobby had been assailing the Truman administration for months over losing China. The day after the North Korean crossing, Senator Styles Bridges, a China Lobby stalwart, said on the floor of the Senate, “Will we continue appeasement?… Now is the time to draw the line.”35 Senator George Malone said, “It is fairly clear that what happened in China and what is now happening in Korea were brought about deliberately by the advisers of the president [Roosevelt]… and by the advisers of the State Department since then.”36 Senator William Knowland (known as the Senator from Formosa) said, “If this nation is allowed to succumb to an overt invasion of this kind, there is little chance of stopping communism anywhere on the continent of Asia.”37

  In The Wise Men, Isaacson and Thomas wrote that Acheson “considered Asia to be a nuisance and a distraction.”38 Acheson had made eleven trips to Europe but couldn’t be bothered to make one trip to Asia, and his decision-making showed his continuing tone-deafness about peoples across the Pacific. Isaacson and Thomas noted that “Acheson’s great fear was that Korea was a fake, a diversionary move from a true Soviet onslaught in Western Europe.”39 When he heard the news of North Korea’s move, Acheson withdrew to a room alone with a yellow legal pad and, according to Isaacson and Thomas, “scrawled little notes: What were the Soviets up to? Where else would they probe? Berlin? Greece? Turkey? Iran?”40

  Acheson advised Truman to move quickly and commit troops to Korea without consulting Congress. “[Truman] did not want to slow down the process, and his constant struggles with the Congress over the issue of China and Chiang made him wary of dealing with his enemies in the Senate,”41 David Halberstam wrote in The Coldest Winter. “The issue of China itself hovered over every decision.”42

  Acheson urged Truman not only to go to war in Korea with no congressional consultation,43 but also to send covert military aid to the French in Indochina for their war against Ho Chi Minh. With no debate—and none was sought—a Wise Man, rattled by events in Asia he little understood, committed the U.S. to current and future wars. A few days later, on June 29, 1950, eight U.S. Air Force cargo planes flew to Asia with war matériel for the French, the beginning of America’s long nightmare in Vietnam. (Truman secretly gave the French military more money to fight Ho Chi Minh in Asia than he publicly gave Paris under the Marshall Plan to promote democracy in Europe.)

  Kim Il Sung had crossed the five-year-old thirty-eighth parallel—not an international boundary like that between Canada and U.S., but the Wise Men’s imaginary line bisecting an ancient nation. Acheson did not comprehend the local antagonisms; he saw only advantage for his NSC-68 Keynesian military stimulus. He later observed, “June 25 removed many things from the realm of theory. Korea seemed to—and did—confirm NSC-68.”44 Martin Walker wrote in The Cold War: A History, “Without the war, the costly plans of NSC-68 would have faced an arduous uphill campaign.”45 Cumings wrote, “[Kim Il Sung’s] invasion solved a number of critical problems for the Truman administration, and did wonders in building the American Cold War position on a world scale.”46 Acheson later told a class at Princeton University that Korea “came along and saved us.”47

  In bitter fighting, the North Korean army almost pushed the South Korean and American armies off the Korean Peninsula and into the sea, but the latter two regrouped and fought their way north, back to the thirty-eighth parallel.

  Having forced the North Koreans to retreat to their original border, the Wise Men could have declared victory. But they wondered if a bold move against Communism was needed and would atone—at least symbolically—for the loss of China. The Wise Men decided to go beyond containing Communism and proceed to a rollback strategy, with U.S. troops crossing the border and marching into North Korea.

  The possibility that the American army might cross the thirty-eighth parallel and invade a country on China’s border got Mao Zedong’s attention. The Wise Men assumed that Mao would never risk confronting the atomic-armed U.S. military, just as the First Wise Man had preached that Japan would not respond to an oil embargo. Though Mao’s China was exhausted by decades of civil war, the U.S. military advancing to China’s borders was an intolerable barbarian threat.

  Korea was General Douglas MacArthur’s responsibility. MacArthur was seventy years old now and a China Lobby favorite. (He shared the record of most appearances on Time’s cover—seven—with Chiang.) He had presided over Japan’s surrender and had ruled the country as its temporary father-emperor. The old general had not stepped foot on the Asian mainland since 1905 and was sometimes delusional as he fantasized about New China.

  MacArthur boasted that if Mao confronted the U.S. military, “[I will] deliver such a crushing defeat that it would be one of the decisive battles of the world—a disaster so great it would rock Asia and perhaps turn back Communism.”48 MacArthur, like the rest of the U.S. military establishment, completely missed the effectiveness of Mao’s war strategies, continuing to believe that modern airpower could defeat Mao any day. MacArthur made bellicose threats about ways the United States might invade China, even suggesting attacking it with atomic bombs.

  Returning to Washington after an August vacation in the Adirondacks, Acheson told Truman that MacArthur should be allowed to push north over the thirty-eighth parallel. Truman agreed with his Wise Man.

  Just as he had with President Roosevelt in 1945, Mao reached out to President Truman. As his messenger, Mao chose K. M. Panikkar, the Indian ambassador in Beijing. A top Chinese military official informed Panikkar that Mao would act if American troops threatened China’s border. Alarmed, Panikkar asked if Mao had fully evaluated the risks of confronting the mighty U.S. military. Reflecting Mao’s thinking, the Chinese official told Panikkar: “We all know what we are in for, but at all costs American aggression has to be stopped. The Americans can bomb us, they can destroy our industries, but they cannot defeat us on land.… They may even drop atomic bombs on us. What then? They may kill a few million people. Without sacrifice a nation’s independence cannot be upheld.”49

  On October 2, Chinese premier and foreign minister Zhou Enlai summoned Ambassador Panikkar to the foreign ministry. Zhou was somber and his message was simple. If the Americans crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, Mao would intervene. At 5:35 a.m. on October 3, a State Department official awakened Dean Acheson with Panikkar’s message conveying Mao’s warning. Acheson ridiculed the idea of Mao entering the conflict as the “mere vaporings of a panicky Panikkar.”50

  When MacArthur’s troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, on October 9, 1950, the Wise Men assumed Mao would not be riled, yet when the North Koreans had violated that same border just months earlier, they themselves had judged it intolerable. As the U.S.—allied with Japan—marched toward China’s border, Mao ordered hundreds of thousands of troops to confront them.

  Though the Chinese had no airpower, they pounded the Americans on the ground in their first clashes. Mao’s troops pushed MacArthur’s forces out of North Korea within two weeks.

  Th
e irrational fear of worldwide Communism as a result of the Wise Men’s misunderstanding of a small Asian civil war persuaded Congress to dramatically increase funding for the military. Martin Walker wrote,

  The first defense budget presented by President Truman after the war began was for $50 billion, the precise figure Acheson had hoped for. The US Army doubled, to over three million men. The number of Air Groups doubled to ninety-five, and were deployed to new bases in Britain, Libya, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Everything changed with Korea. American diplomacy, defense budgets and military reach exploded across the globe.51

  Bruce Cumings concludes,

  The Korean War was the crisis that finally got the Japanese and West German economies growing strongly, and vastly stimulated the U.S. economy. American defense industries hardly knew that Kim Il Sung would come along and save them either, but he inadvertently rescued a bunch of big-ticket projects.…52

  The Korean conflict [would transform] the United States into a very different country than it had ever been before: one with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army and a permanent national security state at home.53

  If the Wise Men had not so bungled the U.S. relationship with China, John Service might have been able to telephone his friends in Beijing to sort things out before trouble erupted. But the mirage lived on. When Truman fired the Mao-beaten MacArthur, the China Lobby shouted that the American anti-Communist crusade in Asia had been undermined. Senator McCarthy snarled about the president, “The son of a bitch should be impeached.”54 In a speech to the Senate, McCarthy asked,

  How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this Government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.55

  In 1952, Democratic incumbent President Truman, having come from behind to win the 1948 election but now tarred by the powerful China Lobby with losing China and almost losing Korea, decided not to run again for president. The 1952 Republican Party’s national convention featured a conga line of China Lobbyists, including Senator McCarthy, Ambassador Hurley, and General MacArthur.56

  In a 1954 press conference, President Eisenhower spoke of the domino theory in terms of Vietnam—an idea that had initially entered Washington’s collective consciousness during the Roosevelt administration:

  You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.57

  Many know that Eisenhower handed his covert war against Fidel Castro to John Kennedy, whose CIA-led invasion of Cuba ran aground at the Bay of Pigs. Fewer link the 1960s killing of millions in Asia with the baton of misperceptions relayed from Roosevelt to Truman to Eisenhower and then onward to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

  Ho Chi Minh was a brilliant political and military strategist committed to ending foreign domination of Vietnam, but Eisenhower saw him as a tool of international Communism. To contain Ho, Eisenhower created a Potemkin country—South Vietnam—that had never existed in history and, despite billions of dollars in U.S. aid, would fall after just two decades.

  To lead his new Asian state, South Vietnam, Eisenhower anointed Ngo Dinh Diem president. Like Chiang, Diem was allied with the wealthy, who kept the peasants in near servitude. Like Chiang, Diem lacked popular support and ruled brutally through his military. And like Chiang, Diem enjoyed excellent press in the U.S., mostly because he was a Christian. (Eisenhower had chosen a Catholic to lead an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.)

  The 1954 Geneva Accords ending the French-Vietnamese War called for free elections in Vietnam in 1956. Eisenhower-era Americans were told that the U.S. encouraged democratic elections in other countries, but the president secretly scuttled the Vietnamese vote because, as Ike later admitted, “It was generally conceded that had an election been held, Ho Chi Minh would have been elected Premier.”58 In the 1930s and 1940s Henry Luce had supported an Asian dictator whom he’d nicknamed Southern Methodist Chiang. In the 1950s Luce was for another Christian loser, this man dubbed the Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam. The American press, still mostly unaware of Asian affairs, followed Luce’s line. Newsweek magazine: “Ngo Dinh Diem is living proof of what is often called a miracle… proof of what an authentic patriot… can accomplish.” The New York Herald Tribune: “The Miracle-Maker from Asia—Diem of South Vietnam.” The New York Journal-American: “How did the miracle of South Viet Nam happen?… The story is largely written in the ascetic personality of Ngo Dinh Diem.” Edward R. Murrow: Diem “has made so much progress in the past six months that some people use the overworked word ‘miracle’ in describing improvements in South Vietnam.”59

  Many believed that the Chinese Mandate of Heaven had moved to Mao Zedong by 1943, the year FDR hosted Mayling in the White House and posed for photographs with Chiang in Cairo. Likewise, by 1957 the Vietnamese Mandate was clearly Ho Chi Minh’s, and President Diem’s only base of support was Dwight Eisenhower.

  On the hot and muggy day of May 8, 1957, television viewers witnessed a historic event: President Eisenhower at Washington National Airport, squinting into the sun, looking up as his personal plane, the Columbine III, brought President Diem of South Vietnam for a visit.

  Eisenhower greeted Diem, escorted him down the ranks of his honor guard, and said into a microphone, “Mr. President, it is indeed an honor for any American to invite you to this country. You have exemplified in your part of the world patriotism of the highest order.”60 Eisenhower and Diem rode into Washington smiling at each other in an open limousine as crowds cheered.

  Eisenhower lavished attention on his miracle man: a private White House meeting and a state dinner, and he attended a dinner in the South Vietnamese embassy hosted by Diem. Diem also addressed a joint session of Congress and the National Press Club.

  Just as the Protestant China Lobby had propagandized for Chiang, a Catholic Vietnam lobby—called the American Friends of Vietnam—beat the drums for Diem. When he addressed Congress, his script, authored by the Vietnam lobby, made complicated matters easy to understand. He compared the CIA-instigated exodus of Christians from North to South Vietnam to the pilgrims on the Mayflower. Republican senator Jacob Javits dubbed Diem “one of the real heroes of the free world.”61

  President Eisenhower greeting President Diem, Washington National Airport, May 8, 1957 (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  In New York, an estimated 250,000 people cheered Diem in a parade from lower Broadway to City Hall. That evening the American Friends of Vietnam threw a glittering banquet to honor him; it was hosted by Henry Luce and attended by Senator John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt, among other luminaries. Luce said, “President Ngo Dinh Diem is one of the greatest statesmen of Asia and of the world.… In honoring him we pay tribute to the eternal values which all free men everywhere are prepared to defend with their lives.”62

  Diem’s eleven-day visit continued, and he traveled on to Michigan, Tennessee, California, and Hawaii. Just as with Chiang, Diem became the only Vietnamese Americans knew: a Christian miracle man who would plant the American flag in Asia.

  John Service, John Davies, and other China Hands had been hounded out of the State Department, so they couldn’t warn President Eisenhower that history was repeating itself. Instead of offering Ike advice on avoiding Roosevelt’s missteps in Asia, John Service was selling steam equipment in New York, and John Davies was manufacturing furniture in Lima, Peru.

  The 1950s saw Americans knowing less about the Middle Kingdom than ever. Henry Luce and his Time-Life empire didn’t dispatch anyone to C
hina for a firsthand view. Most of what Americans learned about China in this period were slanted stories disseminated from Taiwan by the CIA. In 1957, Time reported that journalist William Worthy, a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American, “became the first American reporter to enter China in seven years.”63 When Worthy returned to the U.S., President Eisenhower’s administration took his passport away.64

  In 1958, author Edgar Snow observed that there was not one Chinese-speaking officer remaining in the State Department.

  The China Lobby, first seeded by Charlie Soong in 1905 and planted in the Oval Office by T. V. Soong in 1933, had great staying power. In 1960, author Ross Koen was getting ready to publish his book The China Lobby when shadowy yet powerful China Lobbyists forced Koen’s publisher, Macmillan, to withdraw the exposé. It was allowed to emerge only fourteen long years later, as a paperback.

  All of the 1960s presidential candidates had witnessed the who-lost-China political knife fights in the Truman administration earlier in their careers. John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and Hubert Humphrey had been young senators then, and all understood the political peril in losing an Asian nation. In his book The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam wrote that when Kennedy and Johnson considered their options in Asia, there were no experienced China Hands available to guide them:

  That was the terrible shadow of the McCarthy period.… All of the China experts, the Asia hands… had had their careers destroyed with the fall of China. The men who gave advice on Asia were either Europeanists or men transferred from the Pentagon.…65