Marshall was proud of the American role so far. “We were able to resolve almost every difficulty,” he said, “once we got the people together.” He was particularly gratified by “the most important instrument we have in China,” the Executive Headquarters and its truce teams. He acknowledged that there had been some disagreement about their presence in Manchuria. But on that score he had reassuring news: “They should be on their way there now.”
One important factor got too little attention in Marshall’s account: Marshall himself. “Marshall’s presence is what is holding China together,” Caughey had observed a few days earlier. The paean Wede-meyer sent to Eisenhower included a similar caution: “The permanence of his accomplishment, however, is in my mind contingent upon his physical presence.”
When Marshall spoke to the press, the truce teams were not, it turned out, on their way to Manchuria. He had taken off late in the afternoon with agreement all but inked, teams ready to go. That evening, Zhou reconsidered the directive, insisted the teams needed more authority, and refused to sign. Gillem, a genial man but new to diplomacy, lost his temper.
“He is definitely not a Marshall,” another officer said of Marshall’s stand-in. Gillem hardly needed reminding. He had been in China just over a month, starry-eyed at Marshall’s side. (“Well she is worth seeing,” he wrote in his diary after encountering Madame Chiang. “I hope I am not to act against her too often.”) When Marshall’s C-54 took off, Gillem watched from the airstrip and wished he were on it. Announcing his new role, the press had trouble getting his name right.
A story went around. “What’s this Kuomintang thing?” Gillem was said to have asked a few weeks after arriving. Whether or not the account was true, Gillem conceded that the political intricacies were beyond him. He spent the day after Marshall left reading every memorandum he could. “Gentlemen, this reminds me of a poker game,” he told the Committee of Three. “We have lost the first hand,” but “maybe everything will be all right.” He slept poorly.
As Gillem struggled, Manchuria was in bewildering flux. The Soviets were leaving, that much was clear, taking their “war booty” with them—pieces of industrial infrastructure, as well as pieces of furniture and jewelry. They refused to coordinate with Chongqing as they withdrew, and Communists were taking over freshly evacuated ground before Nationalists could get there. “Too rapid Soviet withdrawal” was the new complaint. “The Russians are pretty cute starting to pull out now,” Melby wrote, “because with the awful confusion that is breaking and that will become worse all they have to do is say, ‘Well? You asked for it.’ ” Both sides seemed to be maneuvering troops for position. In some places they were starting to shoot.
Still, withdrawal was withdrawal, and many, in Washington and Chongqing, had feared it might never come. As it proceeded, Chiang even related a “softening” in the Kremlin’s attitude, with promises to stick to the Sino-Soviet Treaty and support Nationalist control over Manchuria. The Soviets alerted Chiang that the last Red Army troops would cross into Siberia by the end of April. He credited American resolve.
Gillem, meanwhile, kept at it. “Further delay may be fatal,” Marshall wrote back when informed of the discord over truce teams in Manchuria. “Force the issue.”
Gillem tried shame. “Now we have for seven days, one week since General Marshall left, attempted to resolve this problem without success,” he deplored. “I ask you to please reach an agreement this morning.” He tried sympathy, reminding Zhou and Chang of his heavy responsibilities. He tried prestige: “The Army had 7 and a half million men and one more thing—the atomic bomb. Now the man who directed this terrific Army through the war was General Marshall.”
Eventually, Gillem started to get somewhere. Zhou had been quibbling and stalling. He claimed he could do little without permission from Yenan—“my responsibility is too great”—and was having trouble making contact. Gillem put him on an airplane and dispatched it north. When it returned with Zhou no longer on it, Gillem sent Caughey to drag him back. Zhou seemed bitter about criticism he was getting from his comrades. But Caughey invoked Marshall, and Zhou said he was touched by such concern from so far away. Finally Caughey sent word: “I have Zhou.” Back in Chongqing, they signed an agreement directing truce teams to enter Manchuria and visit every “point of conflict or close contact between the Government and Communist troops.” It had been two weeks since Marshall left. Gillem radioed the news to Washington with less triumph than relief.
Marshall got news from Chiang as well. He had closed the proceedings of the Nationalists’ Central Executive Committee declaring, “United States policy is in accord with our national policy.” The hardliners, he wrote Marshall, had been tamed. “You need not worry about the anxieties I expressed to you before you left Chongqing.”
Still, with Marshall gone, it was clear the situation was not quite as settled as many had hoped.
In Washington, Marshall was as busy as he had ever been, including during the war. He worked long days out of an office in the Pentagon. “General Marshall frequently treats the War Department as if he were still Chief of Staff,” an officer cracked.
American generosity would be essential to the survival of the “strong, united, and democratic China” that, against long odds, was coming into existence—but Marshall quickly realized that America was not in a generous mood. He had already warned the Nationalists of “a return to the old isolationism,” to underscore how sharply public opinion could turn against support. Over the past three months, that pressure had gotten stronger, amid inflation, labor unrest, shortages of consumer goods, and Americans’ widespread desire to let the rest of the world handle its own problems for a while.
Marshall knew that was not an option, not “if the world wants peace.” A memo from his staff, noting with condescension “the inability of the Chinese to carry out even the things they agree to in good faith,” had emphasized: “Without American assistance and ‘know how’ there is no chance.” The Chinese government would be “almost certainly foredoomed to collapse.”
The scale of need was enormous. The $500 million in financial assistance under discussion was, according to T. V. Soong, a fraction of what was necessary.* The task of restoring communications would alone require a million timber railroad ties, 100,000 telegraph poles, and 1,000 tons each of iron and copper wire. Marshall, after freezing talks on all but urgent requests at the start of his mission, had asked Washington to quietly prepare an aid package as negotiations progressed. But he had returned to find withering skepticism of China’s ability to use it effectively. A congressionally mandated oversight body, the National Advisory Council, set strict conditions, worrying that “a loan of the public’s money would be wasted.” T. V. Soong complained of American paternalism.
Marshall campaigned assiduously for China’s cause. He saw cabinet secretaries, economists, members of Congress, sometimes multiple representatives of the same agency in a day. He pushed for financial assistance, a massive transfer of surplus equipment, and hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, through the United Nations’ effort, to relieve what he described as “famine conditions.” He advocated for “as favorable terms as possible.” He even tried to get Chiang his own C-54. To the skeptical National Advisory Council, Marshall highlighted the already “substantial advances toward peace and unity.”
The aid was a good investment for the United States, he argued. It would not just keep China afloat; it would promote farsighted reform, the best defense against threats internal and external and the key to turning China into the kind of ally Washington wanted rather than the kind of client it had. To that end, a slew of advisers would come along with support. One would counsel Chiang on finances, at his request. A team of agronomists would examine farming and land issues. And at Marshall’s insistence, a communications adviser would help Chiang understand how his words and deeds were received across the Pacific. The Time reporter chosen for the job, John Beal, did not know China, but he knew Washington, and th
at was what mattered. “Your mission,” he was told, “will be to keep the Chinese out of trouble with the United States.”
Marshall pressed the State Department to send its best diplomats, as many as it could, not just for the embassy, but for outposts around China, including several cities in Manchuria. He recruited officers for the Executive Headquarters and his “elementary school” for Communists. He pushed for congressional approval of the Military Advisory Group and prompt announcement of the China combat theater’s deactivation. He was hearing from Wedemeyer that the Marine presence—already down by 20,000—was “really an irritant and inasmuch as we do not have sufficient strength to cope with a serious Russian effort, it is better to remove the irritant”; the navy also wanted to “reduce the scale of its commitments in China as rapidly as possible.” At the same time, Marshall wanted to be sure that enough troops remained to hold critical points until the Nationalists could take over. As Soviet withdrawal from Manchuria continued, he directed Wedemeyer to transport two more of Chiang’s armies north.
“My most difficult problem,” Marshall had said during the war, is that “the man on the ground, or the commander in each area, clearly sees his own problems but can know little of what is happening elsewhere.” He called it “localitis”: each theater commander complained about his paltry share of overall resources, while Marshall, as the commander of a global campaign, had to weigh “the priority of this theater against that one” and “meet the demands without available means.” Now he was on the other side of the table, as he was well aware—“no localitis involved,” he insisted in the course of an appeal. But as he pleaded for help in China, needs were rising everywhere: Great Britain, continental Europe, the German and Japanese occupations.
And far from expanding American means in the face of expanding global demands, Congress was zealously curtailing them. Truman pushed back. On April 6, as Marshall made China’s case, the president flew to Chicago to speak to an Army Day crowd at Soldier Field. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson had called for peace without victory; now Truman warned of victory without peace. “Victorious nations cannot, on the surrender of a vicious and dangerous enemy, turn their backs and go home,” he exhorted. “Nobody should play politics with the national safety.”
As a rallying cry, it failed. “Rebuffs mark Truman’s first year,” read headlines afterward. The “Truman policy” was excoriated on the floor of Congress: he would have America “police the world,” he would “expend its dwindling resources to bring to other countries a degree of prosperity we have not attained at home.” His call to extend the draft was voted down, the continuing troop presence in Asia denounced. “The quarrel in China,” Senator Mike Mansfield, a former professor of Asian history, had written him, “is a problem for China to solve.” The administration was charged with selling out American interests for abstract international causes and surrendering sovereignty to shadowy international bodies. When whiskey distilleries struggled to get enough grain to meet demand, relief shipments to starving foreigners were blamed.
In pressing for aid to China, Marshall battled these currents, day after day. He turned down invitations and skipped social events, including his goddaughter’s baptism, which had already been delayed for his sake. His time, he wrote a friend, was “so overcrowded with Chinese affairs that I literally had none left for anything or anyone not immediately concerned with them.” That included Churchill, who had hoped to see Marshall before returning to England. Marshall sent a note of regret.
In the weeks since Churchill had given it, the Iron Curtain speech had been causing a furor everywhere. It “gave people the feeling that World War III was approaching,” said Chiang. “Churchill now takes his stand among the war-mongers,” railed Stalin. American newspapers printed arguments and counterarguments, alongside cheerful ads for new cars and dandruff treatments and golf clubs.
The furor made for a different Washington than the one Marshall had left three months before. There were public predictions of war with Russia and backroom whispers about “appeasement.” Members of Congress threatened to out supposed high-ranking State Department “pinkos” on the floor of the House. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had started warning of spies in the U.S. government. A poll registered 7 percent approval of Soviet conduct; the percentage of Americans who thought Moscow could be trusted had fallen from 55 percent to 35 percent in a year.
Another recent speech drew less immediate public reaction than Churchill’s, but had even bigger repercussions. On February 9, Stalin had spoken before an audience in Moscow. When the State Department asked the U.S. embassy there for an analysis, the diplomat George Kennan saw an opportunity to capture in one document what he had been telling superiors for months. He dictated a telegram while lying in bed and sent it to Washington.
A strength of Kennan’s “long telegram,” as it became known, was that it was not in fact all that long. There had been a slew of protracted exegeses of Soviet behavior. Kennan crystallized the challenge into a paper easily read in a sitting. “We have here,” it declared, “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi.” It depicted a Stalin fueled by a volatile mixture of fear, suspicion, and delusion. Kennan recommended a strategy in response: “We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of the sort of world we would like to see.” But most readers focused on his description of the Soviet adversary: “A police regime par excellence, reared in the dim half world of Tsarist police intrigue,” “impervious to logic of reason” but “highly sensitive to logic of force.”
The telegram reached the State Department on February 22. Harriman, Kennan’s former boss, gave it to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. Forrestal read it and promptly had it mimeographed. Before long it was being passed around official circles in Washington. Amid disputes over Europe and the Middle East, broken promises and exposés of espionage, and the start of a quarrelsome session of the United Nations Security Council, Kennan offered a key to interpreting an unsettling new world.
Before Marshall had left Chongqing, his aides had given him a translation of Stalin’s speech. They had also alerted him to mounting attacks on him in the international Communist press. “Over the hard whiskey glasses,” went one, “he will tell anyone who is willing to listen that the United States must fight the Soviet Union within two years, and the plains of Manchuria are ideal for this noble purpose.” Surely, it reasoned, the Soviet Union could not be expected just to stand by.
The longer Marshall was away, the more seemed to go wrong.
Truce teams were supposed to be guaranteeing peace in Manchuria. But those that did reach their destinations were “completely immobilized” by disagreements over what they should do once there, both Nationalists and Communists resorting to delaying tactics when convenient. Marshall told Gillem to make a more serious show of force, leading the Committee of Three itself to Manchuria, but that too was delayed by procedural disputes.
The Nationalists were supposed to be moving forward on democratic reform. But they were instead walking back political agreements struck in January, despite Chiang’s upbeat assurance to Marshall. Condemning the PCC resolutions as a “form of national suicide,” the “diehard” elements Marshall feared had in fact, in the course of the Central Executive Committee proceedings, forced several “revisions”—revisions that would keep basic control in Nationalist hands. American intelligence reported “a new political impasse,” thanks to “continued opposition to the program by right-wing elements of the Kuomintang, who may fear loss of power and influence with termination of one-party rule and the reorganization of the armies.”
The Communists were supposed to be moving forward on military unification. But Zhou had stalled on the first step: submitting a list of which units would demobilize and which would join a unified army. He sent Gillem a litany of excuses—Nationalist hassles, he grumbled, “have rather upse
t my original working schedule”—and promised to deliver the list soon. Instead came a series of public complaints: the Nationalists were delaying democracy, violating the bill of rights (Marshall’s “dose of American medicine”), disregarding press freedom, attacking Communist units, pouring troops into Manchuria, blocking truce teams. It was a plot to “instigate civil war,” Zhou said, and by transporting additional armies the United States was abetting it; how could the Communists relinquish their forces in such circumstances? In fact, Yenan had already sent Zhou an instruction: “Without simultaneous resolution of reciprocal deals on political affairs, military affairs, and territory, we must absolutely not give up any positions.”
The inventory of problems went on. Chinese members of truce teams were flouting orders and issuing transparently spurious charges. The Executive Headquarters was floundering, earning a new nickname: the Temple of One Thousand Sleeping Colonels. Communists were disrupting the reconstruction of railway lines, claiming that prior understandings no longer applied, since Nationalist troops were traveling by train. Chiang expressed second thoughts about Marshall’s “elementary school” for Communists. Yenan seemed to be having second thoughts as well: the Americans were scrambling for a mid-April start, until Zhou said the Communists could not send troops to the school for months.
There were mysterious plane crashes. An American aircraft carrying Tai Li, the gold-toothed chief of the Generalissimo’s secret police, slammed into a mountain near Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum outside of Nanjing. The weather was bad, and Tai himself had overruled the pilot’s recommendation against flying, but his demise begged for conspiracy. Some pointed to the Communists, some the Americans, some the spirit of Sun; some thought Tai had staged his own death. Then another American plane, this one carrying a CCP delegation, got lost and went down in the forbidding terrain around Yenan. Among those killed were close friends of Zhou—he suspected sabotage—and the 13-year-old daughter of the Communists’ representative at the Executive Headquarters.
The China Mission Page 17