The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  Had there been some high Washington officials who had gone through the China experience and survived the aftermath, they would immediately have recognized [the problems in Vietnam].… But people in the administration either did not know what had happened in China, or in a few cases, they knew but desperately wanted to avoid a repetition of it.66

  A few months into the Kennedy administration, Edgar Snow came calling on Dean Rusk, who had become secretary of state. Snow had just returned from China, where he’d discerned that Mao Zedong—whom he had known for over twenty years—was interested in relations with the United States. Here was Mao once again extending his hand in friendship, but Rusk met with Snow for only ten unreceptive minutes. So it would be.

  By the 1960s, Henry Luce had been wrong, wrong, and wrong about Asia for four decades. Now Luce sat knee to knee with JFK and LBJ to push his father’s missionary dream. Luce’s sister later recalled, “Henry was always looking for the opportunity to overthrow the Communist regime in China. He knew that the United States could not simply declare war on the Communists, but he thought that the wars that the Communists started could give us the opportunity to go to China. Part of him really wanted the Korean War to become an American war with China, and he talked about Vietnam the same way.”67

  Two Catholic presidents had opposed the insertion of American combat troops into Vietnam’s civil conflict—John F. Kennedy and Ngo Dinh Diem. They were both assassinated within weeks of each other in November of 1963. Two days after JFK’s murder, the new U.S. president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, met in the White House with the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, a rock-ribbed Republican and a China Lobby man. When Ambassador Lodge walked into his office, Johnson blurted out, “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.”

  Johnson called his friend newspaper publisher John Knight:

  JOHNSON: What do you think we ought to do in Vietnam?

  KNIGHT: I never thought we belonged there. Now that’s a real tough one now, and I think President Kennedy thought at one time we should never, that we were overcommitted in that area.

  JOHNSON: Well, I opposed it in ’54. But we’re there now, and there’s only one of three things you can do. One is run and let the dominoes start falling over. And God Almighty, what they said about us leaving China would just be warming up, compared to what they’d say now.68

  Johnson telephoned his longtime political ally Senator Mike Mansfield, a fellow Democrat and the current holder of LBJ’s former post as Senate majority leader. Mansfield was away from his office when the president called, so Johnson left a message saying, “We do not want another China in Vietnam.” Mansfield responded to the president’s fear of “another China” in a memo:

  I would respectfully add to this observation: Neither do we want another Korea. It would seem that a key (but often overlooked) factor in both situations was a tendency to bite off more than we were prepared in the end to chew. We tended to talk ourselves out on a limb with overstatements of our purpose and commitment only to discover in the end that there were not sufficient American interests to support with blood and treasure a desperate final plunge. Then, the questions followed invariably: “Who got us into this mess?” “Who lost China?” etc.69

  Johnson’s national security adviser was McGeorge Bundy, a well-connected and highly credentialed Wise Man. McGeorge’s father had worked for Henry Stimson, who later honored the Bundy family by choosing McGeorge to cowrite his autobiography. In the early 1950s, Bundy had worked clandestinely with the CIA, and in 1953, at the age of thirty-four, he was appointed dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, the youngest in Harvard’s history. To top it off, Bundy’s wife, Mary, was the daughter of the leading Wise Man, Dean Acheson, upon whom McGeorge relied for advice.

  National security adviser Bundy—who kept a framed photo of Henry Stimson on his desk—disagreed with Senator Mansfield’s memo. Acheson’s son-in-law warned LBJ “as an ex-historian” that “the political damage to Truman and Acheson from the fall of China arose because most Americans came to believe that we could and should have done more than we did to prevent it. This is exactly what would happen now if we should seem to be the first to quit in Saigon.”70

  McGeorge Bundy and Lyndon Johnson. Bundy kept a framed photo of the First Wise Man on his desk. (LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto)

  Henry Stimson had been almost clueless regarding Mao Zedong’s long rise, and Dean Acheson, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, and many other Wise Men never understood Ho Chi Minh’s strategy to beat them, which was based on Vietnam’s two-thousand-year history of expelling invaders, a well-documented chronicle of military triumphs against foreigners. The Wise Men worried about Mao Zedong toppling Asian dominoes instead.

  In 1963, in a televised interview, President Kennedy was asked about the domino theory. Kennedy responded, “I believe it. I believe it… China is so large, looms so high just beyond the frontiers, that if South Vietnam went, it would not only give them an improved geographic position for a guerrilla assault on Malaya, but would also give the impression that the wave of the future in southeast Asia was China and the Communists. So I believe it.”71

  Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was typical of the men who ran national security: a Harvard graduate (in his case, Harvard Business School) and a Europe-focused Wise Man. In 1964 the domino theory became formalized as U.S. policy when McNamara wrote National Security Action Memorandum 288:

  We seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam… unless we can achieve this objective… almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance.72

  While Johnson told the public that the object of the fighting was an “independent, non-Communist South Vietnam,” the president was reading secret memos from McNamara, who wrote that U.S. objectives in Vietnam were in “support of a long-run United States policy to contain China”:

  China—like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30s, and like the USSR in 1947—looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us.73

  Johnson again expressed his who-lost-China fears:

  If I don’t go in now and they show later I should have gone, then they’ll be all over me in Congress. They won’t be talking about my civil rights bill, or education and beautification. No, sir, they’ll push Vietnam up my ass every time. Vietnam. Vietnam. Vietnam. Right up my ass.74

  In 1968, Lyndon Johnson became the second incumbent Democratic president to not run for reelection because of an Asian domino.

  In 1973, as America withdrew from Vietnam in defeat, sixty-year-old Archimedes Patti asked the CIA if he could see the reports he had written from Hanoi about Ho Chi Minh in 1945 as an OSS officer. They were still tightly wrapped in Julia Child’s burlap, unread by the Wise Men. Patti observed,

  In my opinion the Vietnam War was a great waste. There was no need for it to happen in the first place. At all. None whatsoever.… During all the years of the Vietnam War no one ever approached me to find out what had happened in 1945.… In all the years that I spent in the Pentagon, in the Department of State and in the White House, never was I approached by anyone in authority.75

  Many years later, former secretary of defense McNamara explained why the Wise Men had so little understanding of events in Asia:

  Our government lacked experts for us to consult to compensate for our ignorance. When the Berlin crisis occurred in 1961 and during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, President Kennedy was able to turn to senior people… who knew the Soviets intimately. There were no senior officials in the Pentagon or State Department with comparable knowledge of Southeast Asia.… The irony of this gap was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department—John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent—had been purged during
the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights we, certainly I, badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement. We saw him first as a Communist and only second as a Vietnamese nationalist.76

  The Chiang-Chennault illusion that American airpower could have dramatic effects on the Asian mainland had long legs. Harvard Wise Men McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Henry Kissinger dropped more bombs on Asia than the U.S. military had worldwide in all of World War II, yet they lost.

  American airpower in Asia was defeated by the same simple and relatively cheap defense that Mao Zedong had employed: the people went underground. The most heavily bombed country in the world is Laos, which was attacked hour after hour for a decade by U.S. bombing raids. In 2011 I toured the northern mountain strongholds where Laotian Communists had waited out the American air assault. Many thousands of people had been comfortably housed in enormous caverns, and trucks had rumbled along internal roads connecting massive supply areas. The underground theater had a huge stone stage and up to two thousand audience members could sit on polished slabs of stone. Theatergoers remembered enjoying elaborate stage performances as American bombs exploded against the rocks outside. When the Americans eventually stopped bombing, the Communists emerged from their mountain haven and took control of Laos.

  The United States dropped 2 million tons of bombs on the combined European and Pacific theaters in World War II, but more than three times as much—6.7 million tons—on Southeast Asia.77 McNamara later estimated that the U.S. had killed 1.2 million Vietnamese civilians.78 The U.S. bombing killed, maimed, or made homeless tens of millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

  In 2004, a much older Robert McNamara admitted to the Harvard Business School Alumni Magazine that the validity of the domino theory “was never debated at the government’s highest levels.”79

  Chapter 13

  THE CHINA MIRAGE

  If the United States in 1945 had been able to… shed some of its illusions about China, to understand what was happening in that country, and to adopt a realistic policy in America’s own interests, Korea and Vietnam would probably never have happened.… We would not still be confronted with an unsolvable Taiwan problem.… And Mao’s China, having come to power in a different way and not thrust into isolation by a hostile West, might be quite a different place.

  —John Service1

  Harvard’s Theodore Roosevelt told Harvard’s Baron Kaneko that he should use the bully pulpit of the Harvard Club to convince the American public that Japan deserved to colonize Korea. Harvard’s T. V. Soong—recommended by Harvard’s Felix Frankfurter—sold a secret air war in Asia to Harvard’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who tasked Harvard’s Thomas Corcoran to run the covert operation. Theodore White later recalled that his Harvard degree carried him further in Chungking than it would have in Boston and that the Harvard Club of China had a larger proportion of high government officials than the Harvard Club in Washington.

  In the 1960s, McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger of Harvard served as national security advisers to three presidents and recommended massive bombing in Vietnam. (Bundy was such an all-knowing Wise Man that he authored the initial plans that called for bombing Ho Chi Minh into submission without even visiting Vietnam.)

  Within the national security apparatus was a brilliant Harvard graduate named Daniel Ellsberg. By 1971 Ellsberg decided that the United States’ bombing of Vietnam was not effective and was wrong. He then risked his freedom by using his top secret clearance to make unauthorized photocopies of a secret Defense Department study documenting presidential deceptions from Presidents Truman through Johnson. If Ellsberg made these Pentagon papers public, he would be in legal jeopardy, so he traveled back to Cambridge to seek assistance from Harvard Law School professor Jim Vorenberg. The two men sat in Vorenberg’s living room and, after pleasantries, Ellsberg revealed his evidence of executive war crimes and his belief that in a democracy, the public had a right to know.

  [Vorenberg] suddenly held up a hand and said, “I have to stop you right now. I’m afraid I can’t take part in this discussion any further.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You seem to be describing plans to commit a crime. I don’t want to hear any more about it. As a lawyer I can’t be a party to it.”

  Ellsberg then leaped out of his chair and said, “I’ve been talking to you about seven thousand pages of documentation of crimes: war crimes, crimes against the peace, mass murder. Twenty years of crimes under four presidents. And every one of those presidents had a Harvard professor at his side, telling him how to do it and how to get away with it.”2

  In the 1940s Mao Zedong declared it was important for America and China to be friends, that the United States and China were a much better fit than Russia and China, and that both sides would benefit from the combination of U.S. technological know-how and skilled Chinese manpower. A generation later, President Richard Nixon—motivated by the American quagmire in Vietnam and competition with Russia—came to a similar conclusion.

  In 1971 Nixon announced his upcoming journey to the Middle Kingdom, and many turned to the banished China Hands, the last American officials who had had talks with Mao Zedong, back in the caves of Yan’an. One week after Nixon’s announcement, John Service and John Davies appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Service joked, “This is the first Senate meeting where I have appeared without need of counsel.”3 Senator William Fulbright recalled that the China Hands had paid a heavy price for bucking the mirage: “It is a very strange turn of fate that you gentlemen who reported honestly about the conditions in China were so persecuted because you were honest about it.”4 After their Senate hearings, the China Hands went from the doghouse to the spotlight. Service observed, “Even Time magazine just fell over itself to be friendly.”5

  Service traveled to China at the invitation of Zhou Enlai, the premier of the People’s Republic. In Beijing, Service met secretly with Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was excited by Service’s insights and hinted about a meeting between Service and Nixon. But the invitation never came. As Lynne Joiner wrote in Honorable Survivor, her insightful book about John Service, “Years later a former aide explained… they had to be extremely careful not to inflame the China Lobby.”6

  After he returned from China, where he saw Zhou Enlai and other friends from their days in Yan’an, Service testified to the Senate again:

  My recent visit to China convinces me that the root of the current Chinese reality may be found in what we reported from Yan’an in 1944.… I think that our involvement in Vietnam, our insistence on the need to contain China and to prevent what we thought was the spread of Communist influence in Southeast Asia, was based very largely on our misunderstanding and our lack of knowledge of the Chinese, the nature of the Chinese Communist movement, and the intention of their leaders. We assumed that they were an aggressive country, and I don’t believe that they really have been, and, therefore, I think that we got into Vietnam largely, as I say, through the misinterpretation and misfounded fear of China.7

  John Service and Zhou Enlai (Courtesy Service Family)

  For centuries, foreign devils had journeyed to Beijing to pay homage to the man who possessed the Mandate of Heaven. On February 21, 1972, Mao Zedong welcomed President Nixon to his library, where they sat in overstuffed chairs with spittoons at their feet. Now the symbiotic economic cooperation between the U.S. and China would begin, just as Mao had suggested to John Service twenty-seven years earlier.8

  Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. A generation after Mao had suggested it, the two countries would now combine U.S. technological know-how with China’s motivated workers. (Courtesy Everett Collection)

  In 1973, the American Foreign Service Association (a professional association of the United States Foreign Service) invited John Service and John Davies to the Stat
e Department for a luncheon in their honor. The AFSA president recalled, “The luncheon was needed to convince people in the department that McCarthyism was really dead.”9 Two hundred fifty people filled the auditorium and, in another room, three hundred watched on a closed-circuit television feed as speakers, including the historian Barbara Tuchman, praised Service and Davies. The tall, white-haired Service recalled the lesson he had learned about basing American foreign policy on a manufactured domestic mirage:

  There are still countries… where the situation is not unlike that in China during the 1940s. If we keep ourselves in ignorance and out of touch with new popular movements and potentially revolutionary situations, we may find ourselves again missing the boat.… The measure of the need for such reporting is not popular sentiment in the United States as reflected in some segments of the press, or by some Congressional committees not charged with foreign relations… the legacy of Senator Joe McCarthy still needs, in some respects, to be shed.10

  The luncheon was not an official State Department affair, however. Secretary of State William Rogers and national security adviser Henry Kissinger did not attend. It was 1973—forty years since T. V. Soong had used Felix Frankfurter to penetrate the Roosevelt administration—and the China Lobby still had political punch.

  On April 30, 1975, I was a twenty-one-year-old sometime college student back home visiting my parents in Antigo, Wisconsin. A now-famous news photograph appeared for the first time that day; I’m sure that John Bradley, my fifty-three-year-old father, noticed it. All adult Americans probably did.