The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  The photo depicted, according to its UPI caption, “A U.S. helicopter evacuating employees of the U.S. Embassy.” I left Antigo a few days later for an Asian journey that would take me to Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. I never discussed this photo with my father, who passed in 1994.

  I wonder what John Bradley—whose iconic 1945 Iwo Jima image symbolized U.S. military victory—thought when just a generation later he saw this photo of American defeat. And what would he say now if he learned that the reality in Saigon that day was very different from what he was allowed to know back in Wisconsin?

  In the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, the United States had agreed to withdraw its troops from Vietnam, so a U.S. military helicopter evacuating the U.S. embassy two years later appeared to be a legitimate, passive operation, rescuing embassy dependents from the embassy’s roof.

  This historic image was shot by news photographer Hubert Van Es, who later recounted that when he sent it from Saigon’s post office to UPI’s Tokyo headquarters, “for the caption, I wrote very clearly that the helicopter was taking evacuees off the roof of a downtown Saigon building.” But in Tokyo—then as now a key node in the CIA’s Asian operations—someone, no one knows who, changed the caption to: “A U.S. helicopter evacuating employees of the U.S. Embassy.” Van Es observed thirty years later: “My efforts to correct the misunderstanding were futile, and eventually I gave up. Thus one of the best-known images of the Vietnam War shows something other than what almost everyone thinks it does.”11

  April 29, 1975, Saigon, South Vietnam: symbol of American defeat in Asia. This photo shows a CIA Air America helicopter atop a CIA apartment building. Air America was the outgrowth of the secret executive air arm started by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the winter of 1940–41 to save New China. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

  The apartment building at 22 Gia Long Street in today’s Ho Chi Minh City still stands.12 Senior CIA managers had lived there in 1975, and it was they and their families who were fleeing. The helicopter was also intentionally misidentified; it did not belong to the U.S. military but rather to the executive branch’s secret air force, Air America.

  Air America is another legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s secret executive air war in Asia run by Claire Chennault and Thomas Corcoran. In 1947 Chennault and Corcoran talked the CIA into purchasing China Air Transport. (Unknown is the extent of the Soong family’s continuing financial involvement.) In early October of 1948, CAT flew its first mission, a CIA effort to support the crumbling Soong-Chiang regime. Later, the CIA rebranded CAT as the airline Air America, based out of Chiang’s New China on Taiwan.

  Today, the president of the United States commands a private CIA air force. It all began when FDR went around General George Marshall, listened to the Chiang-Chennault siren song, and created a secret executive air force in Asia.

  There are remarkable parallels regarding events in Asia during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both presidents saw Japan launch surprise naval attacks. Theodore Roosevelt had considered the Japanese to be good Asians in 1904, but when Japan repeated its strategy thirty-seven years later, Franklin said it was a day of infamy.

  Both Roosevelts would shape America’s relations with Asia, believing that China was destined to be changed by Christian and American influences. Both made their Asian policies in secret, consulting neither their State Departments nor those few men around them knowledgeable about Asia. A Harvard-educated Japanese baron guided Teddy’s approach. A Harvard-educated Chinese financier shared sandwiches with Franklin in the Oval Office and convinced him that an Americanized New China was near.

  The Roosevelt cousins’ attitudes toward Asia continued to ripple throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Today the executive branch dispatches troops overseas without congressional declarations of war. In 1900, Teddy cheered from the sidelines as the first U.S. troops ever dispatched to Asia without consulting Congress landed on the shores of China. Today the executive branch uses deadly drones with almost no congressional oversight and no judicial complaint.

  Some may resist the uncomfortable historical connections between Teddy and Pearl Harbor; they may not think that FDR has anything to do with the later domestic political pressure on presidents not to lose an Asian country. After all, Theodore tossed Korea to the Japanese over a century ago, and it has been seventy years since Franklin chose Chiang over Mao. And while American historians do their best to whitewash the Roosevelts’ disasters, memories are long in Asia.13

  American misunderstanding of China caused the nation to support Southern Methodist Chiang, bring on a world war that didn’t have to be, oppose the bandit Mao, and go on to fight two bloody Asian wars. About one hundred thousand Americans died in World War II in the Pacific. About fifty-six thousand Americans died in Korea, and another fifty-eight thousand in Vietnam. The total cost of America’s wars in Asia is staggering. Millions of lives terminated, trillions of dollars devoted to rifles, airplanes, and napalm rather than to roads, schools, and hospitals. America’s social fabric was stretched and then torn by the latter two Asian wars, which challenged its citizens’ belief that their country was a beacon of freedom.

  Perhaps America’s most costly diplomatic mistake was the Chinese Exclusion Act.14 If Americans had accepted Chinese people into their mosaic then, the United States would have had many more Americanized Chinese as citizens, ensuring a strong bridge of understanding across the Pacific. If the bridge had not been weakened in 1882, perhaps John Bradley would not have had to listen to his buddies scream to death on Iwo Jima in 1945. Perhaps one of his sons—my eldest brother, Steve Bradley—would not have been almost killed in Vietnam in 1968. Perhaps two hundred thousand Americans would not have died in Asian wars. Perhaps a wider and sturdier Pacific bridge is now a good idea.

  Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were neither the first nor the last to imagine New China. There are still among us many Americans who, like Warren Delano, Henry Stimson, Pearl Buck, Henry Luce, Claire Chennault, and Joseph McCarthy, feel the urge to Americanize Asia. After all, the dream is as old as the Republic, a myth that took root when the United States was newly born. From those early days until now, America has dispatched its hopeful sons and daughters to faraway Asia in search of a mirage that never was. And never will be.

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author is grateful for permission to reprint selections from the following:

  Masayoshi Matsumura, excerpts from Baron Kaneko and the Russo-Japanese War, translated by Ian Ruxton (Morrisville, North Carolina: Lulu Press, 2009). Copyright © 2009 by Ian Ruxton. Reprinted with the permission of the author and translator.

  Joseph Stilwell, excerpts from The Stilwell Papers, edited by Theodore White (New York: W. Sloane, 1948). Copyright 1948 by Winifred A. Stilwell, renewed © 1975 by Nancy S. Easterbrook, Winifred S. Cox, Alison S. Cameron & Benjamin W. Stilwell. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Joseph Stilwell, c/o John Easterbrook.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

  —Winston Churchill1

  Thank you to Reagan Arthur, Kate Barry, Don Belanger, Alison Bradley, Mark Bradley, Fred Branfman, Chris Cannon, Kangyan Chen, Shirley Chen, Victoria Chow, Frederick Courtright, Catherine Cullen, Nicole Dewey, Will Di Novi, Zoë Eager, Max and Sarah Eisikovic, Lisa Erickson, Heather Fain, Dr. Tina Miao Hall, Owen Laster, Kenneth Leong, Gary McManis, Ying Ni, Miriam Parker, Michael Pietsch, Liz Seramur, Robert Service, Michael Sieberg, Geoff Shandler, Allie Sommer, and Ashlee Wu.

  Asya Muchnick, Tracy Roe, and Betsy Uhrig edited this book with consummate skill. The reader will not recognize their critical contributions, but I will always remember.


  Eric Simonoff was instrumental in shaping the concept, and he provided invaluable guidance throughout.

  I honor my father for giving me my focus on America’s relationship with Asia. I thank my children—Michelle, Alison, Ava, and Jack—for their love and support.

  James Bradley

  December 2014

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JAMES BRADLEY is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Imperial Cruise, Flyboys, and Flags of Our Fathers and is a son of John Bradley, one of the men who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima.

  ALSO BY JAMES BRADLEY

  Flags of Our Fathers

  Flyboys

  The Imperial Cruise

  NOTES

  EPIGRAPH

  1. John Service, Lost Chance in China: The World War II Dispatches of John S. Service, ed. Joseph W. Esherick (New York: Random House, 1974), 372–73.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Kentaro Kaneko, “A ‘Japanese Monroe Doctrine’ and Manchuria,” Contemporary Japan 1 (June 1932).

  2. Excerpts from the joint press conference with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, February 19, 1943, American Presidency Project; available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16366.

  3. Sumner Welles, Seven Decisions That Shaped History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951), 68.

  4. Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939), 93–95.

  5. Christine M. Totten, “Remembering Sara Delano Roosevelt on Her 150th Anniversary,” Rendezvous (Winter 2005): 2.

  6. China statement of Hon. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, extension of remarks of Hon. George J. Bates of Massachusetts in the House of Representatives, Monday, February 21, 1949, Congressional Record.

  CHAPTER 1: OLD CHINA, NEW CHINA

  1. Arthur Henderson Smith, Chinese Characteristics (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1894), 325, 330.

  2. Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt 1882–1905 (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 352.

  3. J. Mason Gentzler, Changing China: Readings in the History of China from the Opium War to the Present (New York: Praeger, 1977), 25.

  4. These buildings were called factories, but to avoid confusion I refer to them as warehouses.

  5. Frederic Wakeman Jr., “The Canton Trade in the Opium War,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, ed. John K. Fairbank (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 172.

  6. Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 52.

  7. Jacques M. Downs, The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784–1844 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997), 335.

  8. In 1834, Howqua estimated his fortune at $26 million. (I’ve spelled Howqua’s name with a w, as most of the American traders at the time favored that spelling.)

  9. Ward, Before the Trumpet, 71.

  10. The government official with a New York City Chinatown statue who was mentioned in the introduction is Commissioner Lin.

  11. Fordham University, Modern History Sourcebook, Commissioner Lin, Letter to Queen Victoria, 1839; available at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1839lin2.asp.

  12. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 6.

  13. John Quincy Adams, “Lecture on the War with China, Delivered Before the Massachusetts Historical Society, December 1841,” Chinese Repository 11 (1842): 281.

  14. Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 141.

  15. Downs, The Golden Ghetto, 265.

  16. Ibid., 81.

  17. Rita Halle Kleeman, Gracious Lady: The Life of Sara Delano Roosevelt (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935), 60.

  18. R. J. C. Butow, “A Notable Passage to China—Myth and Memory in FDR’s Family History, Part 2,” Prologue 31, no. 3 (Fall 1999).

  CHAPTER 2: WIN THE LEADERS; WIN CHINA

  1. Pearl S. Buck, “The Secret of China’s Victory,” in China As I See It, ed. Theodore F. Harris (New York: John Day, 1970), 146.

  2. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 325.

  3. Ibid., 329–30.

  4. John Barrow, “American Institutions of Higher Learning in China, 1945–1925,” Higher Education 4 (February 1, 1948): 121–24.

  5. Charles Denby, written in 1895, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Japan: 1931–1941 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 2: 198. Hereafter cited as FRUS.

  6. Marilyn Blatt Young, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 221.

  7. S. Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 2: 359.

  8. Sherwood Eddy, Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 50.

  9. Denby, FRUS, 197.

  10. The exact quote is “Win the leaders and we win the Empire”; quoted in Jerry Israel, Progressivism and the Open Door: America and China, 1905–1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 19.

  11. Ibid., 122.

  12. Paul A. Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Missionary Movement in China, 1890–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 68.

  13. B. A. Garside, One Increasing Purpose: The Life of Henry Winters Luce (New York: Revell, 1948), 36.

  14. Theodore Harris, Pearl S. Buck: A Biography (New York: John Day, 1969), 309.

  15. Nathaniel Peffer, The Far East: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), 117–18.

  16. Hilary Spurling, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to “The Good Earth” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 66.

  17. Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds: A Personal Record (New York: John Day, 1954), 5.

  18. Henry Luce speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, to senior group of Time Inc. employees, quoted in John K. Jessup, ed., The Ideas of Henry Luce (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 380.

  19. Pearl Buck, letter to Mrs. Coffin, December 12, 1918, Nora Stirling Collection, Lipscomb Library, Randolph College Archives, as cited in Spurling, Pearl Buck in China, 111–12.

  20. Absalom Sydenstricker, “The Importance of the Direct Phase of Mission Work,” Chinese Recorder 41 (June 1910): 389.

  21. Jack Chen, The Chinese of America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 153.

  22. Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 164.

  23. Eric T. L. Love, Race Over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 95.

  24. Wong Sin Kiong, China’s Anti-American Boycott Movement in 1905: A Study in Urban Protest (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 19.

  25. Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 271.

  26. Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1992), 140.

  27. Department of the Interior Annual Report, 1885.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid., 37, 38.

  30. Craig Storti, Incident at Bitter Creek: The Story of the Rock Springs Chinese Massacre (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991), 166.

  31. Butow, “A Notable Passage to China.”

  32. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, A Rendezvous with Destiny: The Roosevelts of the White House (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), 29.

  33. Ward, Before the Trumpet, 77.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Ibid., 66.

  36. John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries, vol. 1, Years of Crisis, 1928–1938 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 206.

  CHAPTER 3: THE JAPANESE MONROE DOCTRINE FOR ASIA

&nb
sp; 1. Theodore Roosevelt to Theodore Roosevelt Jr., February 10, 1904, in Elting Morison and John Blum, eds., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951–1954), 4: 724.

  2. Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, in William E. Smith, “Diplomacy: Beef and Bitter Lemons,” Time, January 31, 1983; http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,951916,00.html.

  3. Peter Booth Wiley, Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (New York: Viking, 1990), 321.

  4. John W. Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: New Press, 1993), 1.

  5. Walter A. McDougall, Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 354.

  6. Ito had many titles, including marquis. I use his eventual title, prince, throughout to simplify.

  7. Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 594.

  8. Isaac Don Levine, The Kaiser’s Letters to the Tsar (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 105.

  9. James L. McClain, Japan: A Modern History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 296.

  10. “Extract from Japanese Foreign Office Records,” cited in Masayoshi Matsumura, Baron Kaneko and the Russo-Japanese War, trans. Ian Ruxton (Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2009), 48.

  11. Ibid., 8.

  12. Prince Ito dined with President Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay in the White House on October 21, 1901.

  13. Raymond A. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and the International Rivalries (Waltham, MA: Ginn-Blaisdell, 1970), 23.