The China Mission

by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

  But Marshall had come to understand how elastic a term “self-defense” could be. Each side noted matter-of-factly that if threatened it would of course have to fight back. And so he was not surprised when news of clashes started to come in. Manchuria remained relatively calm, but parts of north China were on the verge of open warfare, particularly in the Shandong territories taken by the Communists in the first days of the cease-fire. There was a flurry of reports of troop movements and attacks; newspapers printed rumors that ex-Nazis were helping the CC Clique plot the Communists’ elimination.

  Marshall saw what was happening: “Each side accuses the other of offensive action and therefore each side under the guise of self-defense seems to be engaging in pitted warfare.” (One American officer wryly termed it “defensive annihilation.”) He was unsure whom to blame more, finding himself sympathetic first to one side’s accusations, then to the other’s. Ultimately, he considered “both sides in the wrong,” each guilty of “outrageous and stupid military actions.” He quickly concluded that Chiang’s promise not to strike first was nothing more than “a sop,” intended to put “the government in a better position before public and probably preliminary to launching a military campaign.”

  For the first time since arriving in China almost seven months before, Marshall asked for Washington’s guidance. “I am so closely engaged and so close to the trees that I may lack perspective,” he wrote Acheson. What came back was of little use. The State Department explained that neither side seemed to want war, but could not overcome distrust to make peace; perhaps there was still a chance of persuading the Soviets not to meddle.

  Although recognizing that China was on the precipice of civil war, Marshall held back. He thought it was a moment for him to stand aside and let the Chinese negotiate on their own.

  “The ultimate success of my mission,” he wrote a friend, “rests in the lap of the Gods.”

  On July 7, the Communists launched a new offensive—this one a rhetorical offensive, aimed squarely at the United States. “American imperialism is far more dangerous than Japanese imperialism,” proclaimed a manifesto released by the CCP Central Committee. “Their aims are to convert our country into a corpse-filled hell, a large concentration camp or a base or colonial settlement for a new war of imperial aggression.” No longer was there any suggestion that a more enlightened American course was possible. The United States was a reactionary imperial power, and could not be expected to behave otherwise. But it would never, the manifesto promised, “succeed in turning China into a colony or a ‘sovereign state’ of Philippine pattern.”

  To Chiang, the CCP’s rhetorical escalation was another encouraging sign that things were going his way. It might finally make Marshall see the right path forward. To drive the message home, the Nationalists were taking every opportunity to highlight cooperation between Yenan and the Kremlin. “As if the Soviets played the music and the Communists danced,” an officer told an American diplomat.

  By now, the Nationalists hardly needed to belabor the point. International tension was seeping into interactions everywhere. In the field, Chinese truce team members told American colleagues that there was little hope of cooperation on the ground until Moscow and Washington had reached a real understanding. In Shanghai, American troops were instructed to avoid bars, restaurants, and clubs favored by Russians after a sailor got into a brawl in a Russian cafe.

  In Washington, meanwhile, the threat from Moscow was more and more central to both strategic planning and political jockeying. The military was devising contingency plans for troops around the world in the event of war with the Soviets. The joint chiefs were compiling a report on Moscow’s goal of “eventual world domination” that included the recommendation, “All nations not now within the Soviet sphere should be given generous economic assistance and political support in their opposition to Soviet penetration.” A new group called the American China Policy Association was demanding an end to “pressuring the Chinese government into making further concessions to the Chinese Communists,” who “have worked unremittingly to make China a satellite of the Soviet Union.” George Kennan was dictating another classified analysis of Soviet strategy: “They evidently seek to weaken all centers of power they cannot dominate, in order to reduce the danger from any possible rival. . . . They will take advantage of every weakness.”

  Marshall had a sense of these currents. Copies of the major magazines—Time, Life, Reader’s Digest, The New Republic—reached Nanjing, along with digests of newspapers and intelligence reports. The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee had recently sent an analysis of Soviet ambitions in Manchuria—“a great threat to the United States as well as to China,” since “Communism is in opposition to the basic Chinese way of life.”

  In the first week of July, Marshall got more direct exposure to the new thinking when Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal arrived in China. Few senior officials had been more focused on the Soviet threat than Forrestal. Hard-driving and pulsing with anxious intensity, he had been warning of the menace of a Russian-Chinese axis for months: “The manpower available to such a combination would be so tremendous and the indifference to the loss of life so striking that it would present a very serious problem to this country.” At the cabinet lunch with Truman in November, Forrestal had seconded the suggestion that Marshall be tapped for the China mission, hoping that the arrival of so formidable a figure would be noticed in the Kremlin. In the months since, Forrestal had kept a careful lookout for any action that might lead down the “long road of appeasement.” It was he who mimeographed Kennan’s “long telegram” and distributed it around Washington.

  On his way across the Pacific, Forrestal stopped to witness an atomic test on Bikini atoll, the mushroom clouds the most vivid display of military might in the world. He arrived in Nanjing a few days later and found Marshall clear-eyed about how much the situation had deteriorated since they had last spoken in Washington in the spring. Marshall was mulling the need for a “period of withdrawal,” including of American troops, to take stock and reset U.S. policy in China.

  But Forrestal left China worried. He wanted a stronger stand, and thought Marshall too intent on trying to achieve peace and not intent enough on backing Chiang. The Chinese, Forrestal concluded from his visit, “were very much like ourselves in the degree to which they prized personal liberty and the freedom of the individual, but they have not yet learned the principles of management necessary to provide a cohesive administration which would give a stable order within which individual people could really have the benefits of freedom.” America’s key task, accordingly, was “the training of the Chinese in the business of management and administration.” Otherwise there would be civil war—and civil war would be “an invitation to some other power or group of powers to come in and dominate China.”

  A string of other official visitors came to town as well, from the postmaster general to agricultural specialists to gaggles of politicians. “Apparently every VIP in the world is determined that the shortest distance between any two points, even Topeka to St. Louis, is the Great Circle Route to Shanghai,” grumbled an American officer. When a congressional delegation landed, most of its members seemed more interested in “after dark entertainment” than official business. “I am ashamed of my law-making country men,” Caughey would say. “These jokers are a class unto themselves.” But they at least brought some consequential gossip: the talk in Washington was of a Republican sweep of Congress in the coming November midterm election.

  The talk in Nanjing was of Marshall’s imminent departure. The end of the cease-fire had triggered another round of rumors that he would soon be gone. Many included the related detail that General Wedemeyer would take his place.

  For months, Wedemeyer had been less than discreet about his promised next post. The news had been all over the papers, especially since his return to Washington for surgery in the spring. He had already discussed it widely in China, and Chiang, expecting Wedemeyer back soon, had tol
d Marshall how pleased he would be by the appointment. Wedemeyer thought it was such a sure thing that he made a special trip to Brooks Brothers in New York to purchase a diplomat’s wardrobe—coat with tails, striped pants, silk top hat. He had told a fellow officer in April, “General Marshall has just informed me that my assignment as Ambassador is only a matter of nomination and approval by the Senate.”

  To Marshall, the rumors were unhelpful. He was more eager than anyone for his departure to come soon. But now that likely meant mid-September, not immediately.

  Other reservations about Wedemeyer had also come to the surface. The next ambassador, Marshall had said, must be someone with “no record of prejudice or advocacy which would irritate either the Chinese Nationalists or the Chinese Communists,” since part of his role might be shepherding a new government into existence. Wedemeyer hardly fit the bill. He had served Chiang directly during the war and was well known as a champion of Chiang’s cause. In exchanges with Marshall, Wedemeyer had emphasized that his appointment would inflame Communist hard-liners. Marshall worried even more that it would embolden Nationalist hard-liners, who would take it as a signal that he was giving up for good.

  Wedemeyer himself had been voicing doubts about the job. “I am increasingly convinced that my position out there will be almost untenable,” he wrote Luce in early July. “When I take over, I predict that the Communists will seize upon this opportunity to abrogate agreements and of course in the minds of the public, both in China and abroad, they will attribute dissensions and confusions to me.” He thought he was “facing serious failure, inevitable.”

  Fortunately, a providential alternative had appeared. In a letter to Acheson, Marshall described another candidate for the ambassadorship: “the most highly respected foreigner . . . Communists and Nationalists alike trust and admire him . . . he is selfless and has only the interest of China and America at heart.” He was referring to China-born and -bred John Leighton Stuart. As ambassador, Stuart would “immediately create on both sides a feeling of greater confidence in the negotiations.”

  Stuart had made China his life’s cause and was a true believer in its promise. At 70, with a thin face and receding gray hair, he was called “Christ-like” by Chinese who knew him. Although trained as a New Testament scholar, at Yenching University he had branched out from religious roots to train students in sociology, journalism, and politics. Chiang’s personal secretary was an alumnus, as were some of Zhou’s young aides. He had long celebrated Chiang’s “patriotic purpose” and “Christian faith,” and could “talk to the Generalissimo as probably no one else can,” as Melby put it. Another diplomat remarked approvingly that five decades on this side of the Pacific had made Stuart “as oblique and, when necessary, just as devious as any Chinese.”

  Marshall pitched Stuart on the ambassadorial post on July 4. It would not have to be a lengthy appointment, just long enough to restart negotiations and make some progress toward democratic unity—a fitting final act to his life’s work. When Stuart accepted, Marshall asked the State Department to table Wedemeyer’s nomination. As consolation, he allowed that Wedemeyer could return later, perhaps as the next ambassador. In the meantime, though, Marshall wanted the whole episode kept under wraps, “so as to avoid if possible insinuations that he has been sacrificed to Communist pressures.” He added of Wedemeyer: “I do not need his assurances that he will willingly and cheerfully do anything I think might be helpful. I know that to be a fact.”

  Wedemeyer did offer his assurances—at least at first, and at least to Marshall directly. Wedemeyer had long claimed not to want the job anyway. Now, he wrote Marshall, “My principal regret about developments is that I will not be associated with you in the effort to bring about stabilization in that complex area.” Wedemeyer even apologized that “continued references, misinterpretations and conjectures both in press and radio concerning my return to China have embarrassed you.” As an addendum he related that an army doctor just back from China had reported that Marshall was “in excellent condition” and doing a “swell job.”

  What Wedemeyer said to others was entirely different. “An atomic bomb along diplomatic lines was dropped in my lap,” he fumed to a friend. Whatever his assurances, he was angry and humiliated. For months he had blabbed about his appointment. He had promised Chiang he would return. (The Generalissimo, Wedemeyer wrote Marshall, “indicated repeatedly how very much he needed me.”) He had spent $695 on the “funeral regalia” expected of an ambassador. A box of Brooks Brothers shirts had already arrived in Nanjing.

  Wedemeyer was as indiscreet in his pique as he had earlier been in his pride. Soon journalists were writing that he had been indecorously dumped for fear that he would “offend the Reds.” In Nanjing, the switch to Stuart had done nothing to check rumors of Marshall’s imminent departure.

  “The situation is developing into a straight civil war,” Marshall said to Zhou, “and unless something is done quickly it will be too late.” It was the evening of July 16, and they were sitting on the bamboo-covered terrace on Ning Hai Road. Summer in Nanjing was proving to be even worse than summer in Washington, DC. The day before, the Chiangs had fled the city for their mountain retreat, with plans to stay until fall. Katherine had gone with them.

  Since the surge in anti-Americanism among the Communists, Marshall had shown a new level of bitterness in his interactions with Zhou. The new CCP line reflected the agility of Chinese diplomacy, personal relationships utilized or discarded as circumstances dictated, but to Marshall the abrupt shift was dismaying. Yenan’s charges were “a routine example of Communist propaganda,” he said, “a technique that is followed regardless of the facts.” Zhou insisted that Marshall was not the intended target of the invective. Marshall did not buy it. “I am the ‘reactionary party,’ ” he retorted. “Nobody else can be charged with this but me, personally.” Aides were taken aback.

  Still, although holding back from direct negotiations, Marshall had not stopped proffering solutions. There could be another cease-fire order. There could be an agreement on military questions—a mutually acceptable formula still seemed possible. They could resolve differences around local governance. “It seems to me that unless we find a basis for issuing the cease-fire order, everything will be out of control,” he reminded Zhou. “All agreements will be wiped out and there will be a general civil war.” As they sat on the terrace, aides passed notes flagging reports of attacks.

  The C-54 tracked the Yangtze’s course inland from Nanjing. The river was broad and meandering at first, but as the plane continued west, Marshall could see mountains rising from the floodplain. The Chiangs and Katherine had set off for their summer retreat in those mountains a few days earlier. He was following behind for a visit, the newly minted Ambassador Stuart in tow.

  In Nanjing, departure had been slightly delayed. With Marshall and Stuart seated onboard, aides left behind on the tarmac could see why: Nationalist pilots were taking off with bombs intended for Communist targets.

  After an hour and forty-five minutes, the plane landed on a grass airfield. Marshall and Stuart crossed the Yangtze on a converted Japanese gunboat, then took a jeep to the base of a steep slope. The only way up 3,500 feet was to walk or be carried. So they stepped into sedan chairs covered with fringed white awnings and resting on pine beams, and bearers in straw hats and rope sandals—Marshall had eight, most others six—hoisted the beams onto their shoulders and started the ascent. Marshall bobbed pleasantly, looking down sheer drops from the sinuous trail at the ribbon of the Yangtze below. Occasionally the bearers paused to wring sweat out of the cotton cloths that cushioned their shoulders or to rub the brown calluses underneath. (“The most undemocratic scene I have seen,” said an aide.)

  As they climbed, the heat of the plains gave way to bracing mountain air. There were stands of teak and bamboo, the smell of pine and chirp of cicadas. After two hours, they started to see European-style stone houses on forested slopes—a landscape Katherine compared to Switzerland.
Then there was a large poster of Chiang’s face hanging by the side of the road, followed by a somewhat smaller poster of Marshall’s with the caption “Most Honored Angel of Peace.”

  The town was called Kuling, a Chinese-sounding pun on “Cooling Mountain Retreat.” The British had claimed the location when China was at its weakest, and missionaries built it into a Europeanized escape from the landscape below. (Among them was an American named Absalom Sydenstricker, father of the novelist Pearl Buck, who spent idyllic childhood vacations in Kuling.) In the 1930s, Chiang had reclaimed the town and made it his summer capital. This was his first time back since the war.

  For Katherine, the move could not have come too soon. The “inferno” of Nanjing was getting to her. “What with the aftermath of eight years of war, inflations, civil war, famine, and epidemics,” she wrote friends, “the charm of China that I had heard so much about was certainly not evident.” Nor did she find anything charming about living in a house full of her husband’s aides, packed into bedrooms and crowding the table at meals. Kuling by contrast was “beautiful beyond description.” The air was fresh, the temperature in the mid-70s on sunny days. There were flowers, brooks, and pleasant paths winding among stone promontories and Taoist temples.

  When Marshall arrived late in the afternoon, he immediately agreed—the scenery was “magnificent” and Katherine’s cottage “delightful.” Down the road from a simple church, it was a gray stone bungalow surrounded by pine trees. A bucolic lawn sloped down to a swimming pool. Just across a narrow stream was the British-built villa that Chiang had renamed Mei’s Cottage, after his wife. Katherine crossed the stream daily to see Madame Chiang, “who seems quite devoted to her in admiration and affection,” Marshall observed.