The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  On Christmas Day, it was Chiang’s turn to host. The setting was sumptuous—thick rugs, delicate vases—and the Chiangs always made for a striking pair: the Generalissimo, head closely shaved and face still except for quick dark eyes, distinguished in a belted tunic buttoned to the neck; his wife elegant in her fitted Chinese dress and spiky heels. Guests were fascinated to see Marshall and Chiang together, both straight-backed and stoic, Marshall a head taller and a few years older. But the real star of the party, as of most parties she attended, was the 47-year-old Mei-ling. “He puts on a good show,” an American officer said, but “it’s a second-rate show without her.”

  By now Madame Chiang was an icon for Americans, noble or sinister according to taste. In the press, she was China’s Martha Washington, an Almond-Eyed Cleopatra. In the U.S. Congress, she was China’s Joan of Arc, its Florence Nightingale. Her U.S. military code names included both Zeus and Snow White.

  Western men fixated on her looks—more “Vogue cover than the avenging angel of 422,000,000 people,” judged a reporter—and in particular on her legs. At Cairo, where she was the lone woman in the high councils of war, they elicited “a suppressed neigh” from the younger officers, the British military chief recorded in his diary. Even the hard-charging journalist Martha Gellhorn, traveling in wartime China on her honeymoon with Ernest Hemingway, noted the “lovely legs,” reflecting, “She is so delightful to look at . . . that you forget you are talking to the second ruler of China.” Indeed, Madame Chiang had learned how to take the Orientalist fantasies projected onto her and use them to her own ends. Though she expressed dismay when told she had “sex appeal,” she could, Gellhorn wrote, “charm the birds off the trees, and she knows exactly what appeals to each kind of bird.” Even Stilwell was susceptible. “You have a man’s job ahead of you,” Madame Chiang told him, “but you are a man—and shall I add—what a man!” He reciprocated with what was for him high praise: that given her forceful personality, she should be minister of war.

  Like her husband, Madame Chiang had a backstory uniquely of her time. Charlie Soong, her Chinese-born father, studied theology at Vanderbilt University and returned home to save souls. But after experiencing the condescension of white missionaries, he redirected his energies: first toward getting rich, then toward the work of Sun Yat-sen. His money funded Sun’s party. His enthusiasm for the Gettysburg Address—government of the people, by the people, for the people—inspired Sun’s Three People’s Principles. His eldest daughter became Sun’s wife. Eventually, his youngest daughter married Sun’s successor.

  Before that, Mei-ling had gotten her education in America. She went first to New Jersey and Georgia, and then to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, to be near her brother T. V. at Harvard. Even with her “Scarlett O’Hara accent,” she became popular and admired on campus. She excelled in philosophy and English literature, winning the class of 1917’s top academic prize. She grew to be vivacious, ambitious, and self-assuredly intelligent, with “a first-class masculine brain,” it was said, and “an almost terrifying charm and poise.”

  When she returned to China and struggled to figure out what to do with all of this, partnership with the Generalissimo helped provide an answer. “Our wedding,” Chiang wrote her, “is a symbol of the reconstruction of Chinese society.” He credited her with half his achievements. In danger, he summoned a line from the Book of Jeremiah: The Lord shall make a woman protect a man. He called her “da,” a shortened version of what she called him—darling.

  With the coming of war, her purpose became clearer. If she had a split identity, as so many claimed—“Madame’s body was born in China, but her mind was born in America”—she would make it a weapon. She would fan the illusions Americans held about China and about themselves. She would give them the heroes they wanted. And she would do it all in her “flawless, tumbling, forthright American,” as Clare Boothe Luce, a Republican congresswoman and the wife of Henry Luce, described her speech. When Madame Chiang toured the United States to rally support, 17,000 people came to Madison Square Garden, 30,000 to the Hollywood Bowl—among them Rita Hayworth, Shirley Temple, and Ingrid Bergman. She reminded businessmen about the size of China’s market. When Roosevelt pledged to send China more aid “as soon as the Lord will let us,” she replied with a smile, in front of 172 reporters, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” She was the second-ever woman to address both houses of Congress. “We welcome you as a daughter is welcomed by her foster-mother,” said a legislator. After rapturous applause, a bill to abolish the exclusion laws was introduced. Newspapers deemed her “the world’s most powerful woman.”

  The adulation brought a backlash. There were stories about her nasty behavior at the White House, the president calling her “a prima donna” and the first lady, seeing her treatment of the staff, cracking, “She can talk beautifully about democracy, but she does not know how to live democracy.” There were stories about the Soong family’s greed and corruption, their untold riches flown out of China. (Intelligence reports affirmed that certain family members, especially Mei-ling’s brother-in-law H. H. Kung, were doing well off war; a State Department official claimed that T. V. Soong was “the greatest crook in the world.”) There was gossip about strife and infidelity in the heroic marriage, so pervasive that it appeared in official reports: she hit Chiang with a vase; he impregnated a mistress.

  By the time Marshall arrived in Chongqing, he was familiar with all of this—the attacks, the acclaim, and the reasons for both. He had met Madame Chiang in Washington and in Cairo. Although he recognized her allure, he was not especially taken in by it. More than her allure, he recognized her value. During the war, her influence over Chiang had more often than not been to the good. Now, Marshall hoped she would have the same effect in peacetime. Already it was clear that Chiang wanted her, and often only her, by his side whenever he and Marshall met: to interpret, to intercede when she saw her husband taking the wrong approach, to smooth the rough edges of his proud stubbornness.

  When the Christmas party was over, Marshall crossed the river with the Chiangs to spend the evening at their country house. Chiang felt at ease among the tall pines and mist-covered hills, his face occasionally even relaxing into what Roosevelt had called a “delightful smile.” Chiang was gratified to see that Marshall continued to treat him with respect—“massage his ego” was Wedemeyer’s advice on handling Chiang—and the conversation centered on a welcome topic, the Soviet Union. The more they talked about the Soviets, the better. Chiang needed Americans to see Mao’s menace and Stalin’s machinations as a single threat that the U.S. and Chinese governments had to face down together. When Marshall asked about the extent to which Moscow was behind Yenan’s activities and the nature of its ambitions in Manchuria, Chiang took it as a very good sign—and an encouraging ending to Marshall’s first days in China, which had gone about as well as he could have realistically hoped. There was a discordant note: Marshall still seemed insufficiently skeptical of Stalin. But going forward, Chiang thought he could make Marshall see.

  When Marshall sat down a few days later to draft a classified message to the president, he too was more hopeful than he had been for a while. He took the time to write the report himself and directed his rear echelon, his man in Washington, to deliver it to the Oval Office by hand. Otherwise, he explained in justifying this inconvenience, they risked the “possibility of a leak which might greatly embarrass if not hazard the success of my mission.” Other than Truman, Byrnes, and Acheson, no one was supposed to see his dispatches.

  In this first one, Marshall reviewed for the president his long days of listening—to Nationalists and Communists and “third party” liberals, to diplomats and students and missionaries and journalists. He related that Chiang “had little to say regarding Communists and much to say regarding Russians.” But he “has been most friendly and I have endeavored to avoid posture of cracking the whip.” As for the rest, “all agree to leadership of Generalissimo and to high-sounding principles
or desires for a more democratic government, a coalition government, and reorganized and completely nationalized army.” The details of how these objectives would be reached were another matter, Marshall conceded, but the parties “appear to be struggling to a more realistic point of view.” He was getting ready, he told the president, to begin the real work of his mission.

  That same day, an auspicious message arrived from Moscow. Marshall had radioed Secretary of State Byrnes for news of the summit there, particularly anything that would indicate “Soviet intent in Manchuria and regarding Chinese Communists.” Byrnes replied that it had not been an easy conference overall, but not because of China. Once he previewed Marshall’s approach, including the option of threatening to withhold aid from Chiang, and explained that there was no reason to fear the U.S. troops in north China, he heard little complaint. Stalin belittled Chinese Communist strength (“All Chinese are boasters,” he would say) and offered no objection when reminded of his past dismissals of their revolutionary seriousness (“The Chinese Communists are not real Communists. They are ‘margarine’ Communists”). The Soviets, Byrnes concluded, “will not intentionally do anything to destroy our efforts for a unified China.” They would withdraw the Red Army from Manchuria by February—after plundering its resources and securing the quasi-imperial privilege the Kremlin wanted—and otherwise stay out of China’s problems.

  Stalin, Marshall was informed, was likely to follow his recommendations on the assumption that if anyone could find a solution to the whole mess, he could. Stalin had observed that Marshall was turning out to be both a soldier and a statesman.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Committee of Three

  At 4 o’clock in the morning on the first day of 1946, a 33-year-old colonel named John Hart Caughey was awakened by military police in Shanghai and ordered to get to Chongqing as fast as he could. Caughey was already unsure what to make of this new year. He was in an army that was no longer fighting but would not send him home. He was in a country where a war had ended but peace had not yet arrived. A few hours earlier, just after midnight, the flow of traffic had reversed. Drivers, bicyclists, and rickshaw pullers across China were ordered to switch from the left side of the road to the right, since a surge in American-made vehicles operating under British-inspired traffic rules had caused accidents to spike. The switch promised improved safety, maybe someday a fruitful partnership between American car manufacturers and Chinese car buyers, but on this day it meant confusion.

  By 6 o’clock that evening, Caughey was in Chongqing, reporting to General Marshall himself. Marshall had been there for ten days and still revealed little. “He just sits and listens,” a diplomat said, giving people “the creeps.” At his 65th birthday dinner the evening before—Chiang invited 150 guests but told his staff not to make it too lavish, knowing the honoree’s austerity—Marshall’s toast was so subdued that some Nationalist officials took offense.

  But Marshall was getting ready to act, and he needed a team. He had brought the three aides—knowing Jim Shepley, ambitious Hank Byroade, and cook and orderly Richard Wing. But he was accustomed to having the entire War Department behind him, and becoming aware of the full complexity of the task before him now. So he began enlisting others. Hart Caughey would become his executive officer; a quietly efficient standout on Wedemeyer’s staff who was from Marshall’s part of southwestern Pennsylvania, the clean-cut, square-jawed Caughey had been an Eagle Scout, a star at West Point, and a good enough baseball player that the New York Giants had tried him out at first base. The diplomats at the embassy, including John Melby, would draft analyses for Marshall. Dismayed to find that the Cantonese-American interpreter assigned to him could barely understand Zhou Enlai’s Mandarin, Marshall tracked down a Chinese-born American intelligence officer named John Soong who was about to return to Chicago to complete a doctorate; Soong’s return was delayed indefinitely, and his new wife and infant son were told to join him in Chongqing. Happiness Gardens started to buzz as Marshall prepared his moves.

  Over the previous days, Caughey had mused about Marshall’s prospects. He wrote long letters to his wife, Betty, in South Carolina, full of worry about “the seeds of the next war.” On his flight, as the plane dropped through thick clouds above Chongqing, he anticipated seeing “a lonely man this evening, one who is shadow boxing in the midst of Chinese pressures.”

  Then Caughey met him. “I’ve never seen or been in the presence of a man like Gen. Marshall,” he gushed. “Calm, persuasive, and infectious.” He was “spell-binding,” left leg crossed over right as he issued instructions and inquiries and then stared straight on, foot fidgeting but hands still, awaiting a response. “You sit there,” Caughey wrote Betty, “so very much aware of his background and the things he has done for this country of ours,” yet he was “modest” and “completely without vanity.” There were rumors that Marshall was exhausted, maybe sick, fanned by the infrequency of his public appearances and his impassivity in meetings. On the contrary, Caughey concluded, Marshall was, in his quiet way, a “ball of fire.”

  To see Marshall close-up as he started into action was at once magnificent and terrifying. “You are only conscious of his dominating influence,” at risk of becoming so awed, Caughey related, as to “lose the trend of his thought, which, I might add, is a most dangerous thing in his presence.” Aides felt his mind at work, the intensity of its focus, and Marshall had, by his own description, a wicked memory. It was said he could skim a memo and recite its contents days later; during the war, he looked at nine newspapers a day. As he synthesized facts, speedily brought all elements of a problem together, he could be impatient when others struggled to keep up. “You can only make one mistake and boop,” Melby observed. “In a few cases I think he has been a little unnecessarily inhuman about it. This ain’t war still or yet.” An officer who briefed him on military affairs compared the experience to “holding a lesson in flying for a bald eagle.”

  Never go to him with a problem, veterans warned, without having a proposed solution. You would be met with a silence that shook you more than the cruelest tirade. Caughey caught on quickly: “He does not like to be asked too many questions and the thing he dislikes most is to have someone not do something.” Early in World War II, Marshall said as much to Eisenhower: “I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.”

  He demanded directness, in interaction and in composition. He despised obsequiousness and the indefinite pronoun. Aides watched him slash through their drafts, changing “sentences to clauses, clauses to phrases, and phrases to words,” one recounted, “the greatest course in English composition I ever was exposed to.” Caughey would work into the night and take his effort to Marshall in the morning: “The General will pick up the paper, say nothing, but look at me over the top of his glasses in a piercing contemplating way and then pick up his pen—or mine if his is out of ink which it usually is. He will put new periods in, switch words, alter sentences, add thoughts and delete thoughts—all with lightning speed. The result is masterly to say the least. With the barest and only most essential changes he converts a clumsy effort into a finished product with almost biblical perfection.” He nagged the younger men about their smoking: he had quit, and they could too.

  Those who could hack it grew to love “playing varsity ball for GCM,” as one said. There was no better way, an already nostalgic wartime aide counseled a successor, “to learn at firsthand that nothing can beat the combination of intelligence, integrity, and appreciation.” This last quality was what those who persisted came to recognize. For all the ruthless expectation and bluntness, Marshall was not a tyrant. “Formidable yes—that explains him to a ‘T’ but he is not formidable to a fault,” Caughey told his wife. “With it he is kind, sympathetic and considerate but damn he is a stern man—strong in thought, principle, and purpose.”

  Caughey’s preconceptions also proved off in another way. He did not, as he anticipated on the way to Chongqing, find Mar
shall mired in despair about the challenge. In fact, “it looked as though things were not only well under control but that they showed promise for the future,” Caughey wrote a few days later. “General Marshall reflected that promise in his attitude and in his demeanor.” The promise lay in the plan taking shape to sit down with one representative from each side and hash out an agreement. If there was cause for hope, it would be found in this Committee of Three.

  Marshall had been listening, but that did not mean he had been passive. His questions, his looks, were meant to convey something. He was hearing principles and platitudes and goals. He wanted means, details, a way of getting there—that is what the repeated questions were getting at. Now, with both the Nationalists and Communists assenting to a three-sided discussion on stopping the fighting, means and details would become everything.

  Chiang Kai-shek named Chang Chun, another Confucian-turned-Christian and a seasoned Nationalist official, to represent the government on Marshall’s Committee of Three. Years earlier, Chang had been in charge of the Shanghai arsenal around the time of the massacre of Communists there. Despite that history, he was known as a dealmaker, and respected by opponents. He had been foreign minister, head of the National Military Council, and governor of Szechuan province, and also a chief negotiator with the Japanese.