Marshall read his draft order aloud. The headline was the easy part: “all hostilities will cease.” He went line-by-line through the rest, glasses perched on his nose, turning to Zhou and Chang as each was translated: “Will you accept that?” When expedient, Marshall skipped over a contentious issue; at other times, he fixed on details. “What does ‘these’ mean?” he asked when presented with a reviled indefinite pronoun. When he thought a point was mischaracterized or misunderstood, he interrupted to set the record straight. He was relying on his new interpreter, John Soong, rather than trying out his old army Chinese, but Zhou knew enough English to follow the translation, and he did carefully. Not necessary, he would correct, “I said mandatory.” Not strategy, tactics. Not in a month, in this month.
It went on like this for three hours. Before letting Zhou and Chang leave the house, Marshall indicated the reporters outside. Premature announcements or dueling leaks would be fatal. He urged them to keep any messages to the press upbeat and vague.
“Things are going quite well,” Chang said. “Things are going very well,” Zhou said.
When the Committee reconvened the next morning, the atmosphere was good. Concord on basic points seemed to have generated rapport, as Marshall intended. He invited photographers to capture the three of them at work. When he sensed a looming disagreement, he called a break. “Now, Gentlemen, it is a little after 11 o’clock and I have given you no tea, so I presume that I have offended Chinese custom,” he said. “Also to follow an American custom, when you reach a certain stage of a baseball game, which is the 7th inning, all business ceases and everybody stretches their legs.” Soong sometimes swapped in a Chinese joke or reference for an American one, so that Marshall would see Zhou and Chang smiling without in fact knowing what they were smiling at. In any case, the seventh-inning stretch worked. By the time the three of them sat back down, Zhou and Chang were ready to work it out.
Anyone who had witnessed Marshall in action at a conference table over the previous four years would not have been surprised by his deft orchestration. World War II had provided an extended training in fractious diplomacy, with bitter disagreements, personal hatreds, and violent tantrums even among the Allies. “As a negotiator he was without peer,” General Wedemeyer marveled of his performance at a wartime meeting. For the aides now seeing Marshall the diplomat for the first time, it was, Caughey wrote, “a pleasure to watch him operate. Completely open, completely firm and resolute. No punches were pulled and finally the opposition pulled none, which is rare—if not unprecedented—and the major points were ironed out through sheer sweat.” John Melby thought of Marshall as the “guiding spirit” of the Committee of Three.
By this second day, January 8, the press was ready to declare victory. “The promise of peace in China,” went the stories, “looked brighter than at any time for years.” In reality, however, the Committee was getting to the hard part. That fighting should stop was not in dispute; what each side should be obligated or allowed to do after fighting stopped was another matter. As differences came to the surface, Zhou and Chang started to argue over word order, preposition choice, definitions. They quibbled over the meaning of “communications” in the process of working out a guarantee, essential to the Nationalists, that railways, roads, and telegraph lines would not be sabotaged or blocked. Even Marshall, typically a zealot for precision, was driven to ask, “Are hostilities going to depend on the word ‘the’ here?”
Ultimately, the discord came down to one issue: where Nationalist troop movements would be permitted after a cease-fire went into effect. Most troops would have to stay in place, to avoid clashes, but both sides accepted that the government should be allowed to continue moving armies in certain areas in order to reestablish rightful control. The question was, which areas? Zhou conceded on Manchuria, in keeping with Stalin’s promises to Chiang. But in two provinces bordering Manchuria, Rehe and Chahar, the Communists were intent on holding ground against further Nationalist incursions. “By raising this point, it would only make the realization of cessation of hostilities impossible,” Zhou protested when the prospect of troop movements in the provinces was mentioned. He questioned Nationalist good faith—if the goal was to bring the two armies together as one, what did it matter who controlled the territory now? Chang, however, wanted explicit recognition that Nationalist troops would be able to enter.
As the third day of the Committee of Three got under way, it seemed at risk of coming apart. The rancor quickly rose, and Marshall cut in: “Gentlemen, it appears to me that there is a complete disagreement with no prospect immediately before us of reaching any acceptable compromise.” Everything else was settled. It would be a “tragedy to have this conference fail at the last moment.” Tragedy or not, neither side gave ground. Marshall ended the session early, certain it would only get worse.
At 10 o’clock that evening, Marshall went to see Chiang. He had thought about laying out his argument in a note. But then he thought better: the only way to persuade Chiang to compromise would be face-to-face.
The Nationalists’ hard line on Rehe and Chahar had come on Chiang’s orders. In fact, in the days ahead of the Committee of Three’s launch, Nationalist armies had been battling to take control of the territory before talks began. The CCP had reason to hold out. The two provinces included important junctions, at Chifeng and Tolun, and offered a route into Manchuria from its base area around Yenan. “We must completely control them,” the Communists had resolved.
Marshall had some grasp of the territory’s significance, and he respectfully acknowledged Chiang’s concern. But the trade-off was worth it, he argued; Chiang gained far more than he lost from the Committee of Three’s agreement. Zhou had consented to a Nationalist takeover of Manchuria, and he had also agreed to start talks on bringing Communist armies under the government’s control. These were major gains, as Chiang recognized. What was more, Marshall noted, the Nationalists did not have to cede the two provinces; they just had to postpone a settlement, to be worked out in the coming weeks and months. And finally, Chiang should have an interest in announcing a cessation of hostilities quickly. The next day, he was going to be presiding over the start of a multiparty conference on China’s political future. Opening with a declaration of peace would send a powerful positive message—while opening with a tacit acknowledgment of the Committee of Three’s failure would send a powerful grim one, to both Chinese and American audiences. Politically, that would make it extremely difficult for Washington to provide Chiang the extent of aid he needed.
When Marshall left at midnight, Chiang had given in. They would issue an order to stop fighting without mentioning the two provinces.
At 8:30 the next morning, January 10, the Committee of Three was back together. Zhou and Chang had gotten calls after midnight telling them to come early. Marshall recited the order clause by clause, with the others assenting—“yes, sir”—and Marshall then ratifying each as official: “It is so ordered.” For the signing, Marshall invited the photographers back in. He staged the scene like a theater director, arranging it carefully to present the image he wanted. He prepared his fellow members of the Committee of Three like a team captain: “There is no ‘I’ in this, it is all ‘we.’ ” As each signed the order—Marshall in uniform, Chang in a dark suit with a white pocket square, Zhou in a tailored black tunic—the other two stood behind and observed approvingly. Marshall paused to reflect on the promise of the Committee of Three’s success: “I think it may be looked upon in general as a very important foundation stone in achieving an effective unity for China, which of course means a great deal to the future peace of the world.”
Over the coming days, American military planes would take off from airstrips across China. They flew low over ravaged landscapes, above far-flung armies that had been at war for many years. When the pilots released their loads, not bombs but leaflets fell to the ground below—hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper printed with news of peace.
CHAPTER 5
Unity Out of Chaos
The Committee of Three had finished its work just in time. Hardly an hour later, Chiang Kai-shek rose before Chinese political leaders of all stripes and announced that fighting would stop. In the room there was a roar of applause. Reporters hailed a “long stride in a new march toward peace and greatness.” Some registered it as “an important gain—both politically and militarily—on the part of the Nationalists,” while in Yenan Emancipation Daily pronounced “the beginning of a phase of peaceful development, peaceful reform, and peaceful reconstruction.” An American commentator declared victory: “General Marshall’s mission is complete.”
Marshall knew better. “I hope it will prove historic,” he said to Zhou and Chang. Yet all they had really achieved, he reminded them, was “a pause for deliberation”—a window of opportunity for working out more fundamental solutions. In the meantime, if peace was going to keep, Marshall had to find some means of keeping it.
In fact, he had quietly put plans into motion days before the Committee of Three first convened. Since January 1, his staff had been drawing up blueprints. Officers had been scouring military posts for spare trucks and radios and holding secret late-night conferences. When, on January 10, shortly after the Committee of Three came to agreement, Marshall turned to his aide Hank Byroade and told him to have a peacekeeping operation started the following afternoon, the pieces were in place. The next day, Byroade was in room 308 of a Beijing hotel launching a new body called the Executive Headquarters. What the Committee of Three had managed in the living room of Happiness Gardens, three-man Executive Headquarters “truce teams” would attempt in disputed territory across China. It was Marshall’s way of turning principles on paper into facts on the ground.
There was a three-day lag between the signing of the order and the start of the truce. Although Marshall worried that both sides would use any delay to maneuver for final advantage, Zhou and Chang jointly overruled his objection, on the grounds that they needed time to get the news to commanders. The immediate result of the Committee of Three’s success was thus more violence, as Marshall feared, with armies scrambling to claim or entrench positions up to the last moment. Even once the cease-fire started on January 14, Zhou and Chang repeatedly complained of violations, charges that, when relayed to the other, elicited identical excuses of poor communications and self-defense. Byroade suspected both sides were exaggerating for purposes of preemptive propaganda, to deflect blame if the cease-fire failed. But it now fell to the Executive Headquarters, working out of Beijing, to resolve such disputes and stop transgressions.
“You have my full confidence,” Marshall told Byroade. “You are free to call on me direct and personally for any assistance whatsoever.” Marshall wanted Byroade’s operation up and running quickly, since for the cease-fire to work, “there must be an impartial source of direction and authority on the ground.” He offered his C-54 to ferry personnel and summoned one hundred colonels, “ages 42 to 58, physically fit,” to staff the Executive Headquarters. He had Byroade, just 32 and not a decade out of West Point, promoted to Brigadier General to bolster his authority. Within days, truce teams were on their way into the field to enforce peace, armed with a basic set of rules (“One force holding a city—other will withdraw one day’s march,” “two forces in a city—both will withdraw one day’s march”) and uniform kit (truck, axe, compass, sketching set, six rolls of toilet paper).
The peacekeeping effort replicated the principle of the Committee of Three. The Executive Headquarters had three senior commissioners, an American, a Nationalist, and a Communist. (When Walter Robertson, the senior diplomat in China and Marshall’s pick for the American slot, had said he wanted to go home, Marshall replied, “I want to go home too.”) Each truce team consisted of three officers, American, Nationalist, and Communist, and made decisions by consensus. According to instructions, the American role was “solely for the purpose of assisting the Chinese members in implementing the Cessation of Hostilities order.” (Marshall had inserted “solely” to allay suspicion of other agendas.) But as in Chongqing, the American served as “chairman” and controlled the record. Disputes, the idea went, would be assessed, argued over, and adjudicated in the field rather than escalating to higher levels or reverting to violent means. The first destination for a truce team: Rehe and Chahar, the two provinces that had brought the Committee of Three to the brink of failure a few days earlier.
Something like peace seemed to take hold. At first, the Executive Headquarters reported merely “an inclination among American military observers to agree that there is less fighting.” Before long, however, there was grand talk of “a courageous experiment to substitute negotiation for warfare as an instrument of national policy.”
But Marshall knew this peace was only a pause. The question now was how it would be used—whether, as he hoped, the “good faith that will be built up” would reveal solutions to insoluble problems. The gathering of political leaders under way, the Political Consultative Conference, was taking on one of those problems. But the “hardest problem of all” and “great fundamental requirement for a peaceful China,” in his mind, was bringing Communist troops into Nationalist armies. Marshall had planned to leave this task to the Chinese. A few days after the cease-fire went into effect, however, Chiang proposed that Marshall join a new Committee of Three, officially the Military Subcommittee of the Committee of Three, to address military integration. Zhou readily seconded the suggestion: “This will make us come to agreement.”
In China less than a month, Marshall was more entangled than he had ever intended. “Conducting war,” he would say, “is a relatively simple profession, because one understands clearly the objectives to be attained. To make peace seems to me to be a more complicated matter.”
The next time the original Committee of Three came together, it was for dinner and a movie. Zhou and Chang shared a ride to Happiness Gardens and chatted as they ate—like “old Jeff Davis and Seward, attending a dinner together with a special British delegate during the Civil War,” as Hart Caughey put it. The movie that evening was True Victory, a documentary about the American invasion of Germany. “You know, now that I’m away from that, I find it unreal,” Marshall remarked when images of concentration camps appeared on-screen. “Hard to believe that it ever happened.” Zhou and Chang were transfixed.
With the cease-fire on, the machinery of peace in place, life took on a kind of normalcy. At the table, over Chinese dishes he had come to relish, Marshall told stories about hunting trips, about his time in the Philippines, about military history, about World War II. “I’m almost convinced he knows more about everything than anybody,” Caughey raved to his wife. “He can pull out of his head more ideas and facts than you can shake a stick at—all without the slightest effort and all in the most interesting sort of a way.”
Marshall also had a striking ability to detach. “You ought to see the way he relaxes when the pressure is off,” Caughey wrote. “That is very uncommon among people who fight with their minds. Usually those kind of people wear their minds out, if they have a mind.” Marshall had learned that lesson years before and, more recently, discovered an added imperative: when he looked worn out, the public assumed a mission was going poorly. In Chongqing, he napped briefly nearly every afternoon. He took sightseeing walks with Caughey. His demand for books—“he reads cheap fiction endlessly,” Melby scoffed to Lillian Hellman—put a strain on staffers charged with keeping him supplied. His rear echelon in Washington sent a steady stream of movies. Sometimes they were along the lines of The Atom Strikes, a documentary about devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; more often Tarzan and the Leopard Woman or Home Sweet Homicide. Either way, Marshall concentrated as intently in a screening as in a negotiation. In the middle, to the amusement of guests, he broke for ice cream.
Through it all, Marshall wrote a friend, “I long for personal freedom and my own home and simple pleasures. My shooting trips were all arranged for this winter with horseback rides
on the lonely Pinehurst trails and a month in Florida at a luxurious cottage that had been placed at my disposal. But, here I am.”
The Chiangs were solicitous hosts. When he met with the Generalissimo—the only interlocutor too important to come to Happiness Gardens—Marshall would often arrive early, to strategize with Madame Chiang, and stay late, for cocktails or dinner. Madame Chiang perfected her technique for making his preferred Old Fashioned—Wedemeyer gave her a crystal cocktail shaker—and corrected American staff when their attempts fell short. She cultivated his aides, sending their children back in the United States birthday presents. (It reflected long-standing Chinese practice: a century earlier, an imperial diplomat advised showering “barbarians” with gifts.) She urged him to make use of their country estates: “Go out and get some color into your cheeks.” At one, a leafy complex spread over hills across the river, the thick canopy an effective defense against bombers, Marshall was given a cottage with superb feng shui and studded walls that impeded eavesdropping.
The Chiangs were hardly the only ones eager to host him. Invitations came from generals, warlords, journalists, and foreign representatives. Over dinner and vodka at the Soviet embassy, Marshall and Ambassador A. A. Petrov talked amiably of past cooperation between their countries and the need for democracy and unity in China. (Petrov had no idea what his government was actually up to; his directions from Stalin were to not interfere, and he begged off meetings with the Communists whenever possible.)
The China Mission Page 11