* Equivalent to $130 billion in real dollars today, and roughly $900 billion today measured as a percentage of GDP.
† Equivalent to $30 billion in real dollars today, and roughly $200 billion today measured as a percentage of GDP.
‡ A United Nations force was possible only because the Soviets were boycotting the Security Council to protest the fact that Chiang’s government, rather than Mao’s, still controlled China’s seat.
POSTSCRIPT
Substitutes for Victory?
Foreign policy is made by analogy. The stories we tell matter. How we tell them matters.
When considering their country’s role in the world, Americans like stories of heroism or villainy, of clear triumph or utter catastrophe. In the standard telling, the years covered in this book are a prime exhibit of heroism and triumph. They mark the start of the American era, a period of visionary leadership that supplied doctrines and models still invoked today. The Marshall Plan, the transatlantic alliance, the democratic renovation of Japan and Germany, the self-sacrifice of the Greatest Generation and foresight of the Wise Men: all fit into a narrative of power and purpose reshaping the world and ultimately winning the Cold War.
More than any other figure in that narrative, George Marshall embodies the conception of American leadership at its best—strong, generous, bold. The Greatest Generation venerated his greatness, the Wise Men his wisdom. Politicians, policymakers, and military officers in every decade since have claimed to be carrying on his legacy. The tradition that began soon after his Harvard speech continues: every great challenge, whether in the Middle East or middle America, still seems to be met with calls for a new Marshall Plan.
The China mission cuts against the conception of American power that Marshall and his era have been taken to represent. It is a story not of possibility and ambition, but of limit and restraint; not of a victory achieved at any cost, but of a kind of failure ultimately accepted as the best of terrible options. Perhaps not surprisingly, the common understanding of Marshall and his accomplishments has tended to leave out his time in China altogether.
But Marshall would not have told the story that way. The China mission was as integral to the record of those years as any of his justly storied achievements. It loomed large in his lived experience—the debate over the “loss” of China, after all, became one of the most poisonous in American politics—and also powerfully shaped his approach to the Cold War world taking shape. To Marshall, failure could not be separated from the broader record; reckoning with limits, “trying to keep to the things we could do” and focusing on those battles that could be won, was essential to overall success. Neither his story nor his country’s was as straightforwardly triumphant as the mythology would come to hold.
“You are dealing all the time with the Monday quarterback,” Marshall, near the end of his life, commented to his biographer Forrest Pogue. “In many cases, most cases, he wouldn’t have dared to do the things he talks about. But after it is all clear and all is seen, he can tell you pretty well how it ought to have been done.”
Marshall was leery of retrospective judgments. To him, hindsight was not 20/20; it obscured as much as it clarified. Even when carried out earnestly, without self-serving aims, the “Monday-quarterback business” rarely captured the true choices at the time of action, what was known and what was not, what resources were at hand and what constraints were in place. (“When you judge decisions,” Marshall beseeched Congress as McCarthyism gained steam, “you have to judge them in light of what there was available to do it.”) Veiled counterfactuals could too easily assume the benefits of an alternate course while ignoring the attendant risks, costs, and trade-offs. The supposed clarity of hindsight was often just comforting myth—or low opportunism, with many who had advocated something in the moment of decision claiming bitter opposition or brilliant foresight later on. “Their later states of mind don’t accord with what they had in mind at the time,” Marshall observed. “They are sort of ‘backed out’ by the political recriminations and accusations.” He did not name names.
Over the thirteen months of Marshall’s mission, an unsettled world was changing fast. At the start, American policymakers still hoped that Allied unity in the war could be extended into the postwar. They pushed a series of “one-world” initiatives, as the historian John Lewis Gaddis has put it, aimed at sustaining great-power cooperation and collective problem-solving, with the Soviets (and the Chinese) at the table. There was the United Nations, joint humanitarian relief, the new Bretton Woods economic structure of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—and also the common effort to avert breakdown in China. In time this changed, making early hopes for comity look naïve. The opportunists denied ever having shared them, and those one-world visions were refashioned for a divided Cold War world.
Marshall, like most Americans, never fully grasped the negative capability the Chinese brought (and continue to bring) to diplomacy. For all his efforts to see the world through negotiating partners’ eyes, he did not quite bridge the divide in worldviews, with clashing notions of power that were in the end irreconcilable. Marshall knew both sides were set on playing him for their own ends—not just at the negotiating table, but also during the parties and picnics, over the cocktails and card games. Even with that awareness, their moves sometimes baffled him, particularly as the end came. He could not always help projecting an American understanding of political contest onto their more existential fights, failing to fathom just how far they were willing to go.
Marshall could have given the Nationalists the full-scale support they wanted, military and economic, without pushing restraint or cease-fires. Or he could have refused to fulfill World War II–era agreements to assist the Nationalists into 1946, cutting them off more quickly and sharply than he did, and made a decisive turn toward Mao, banking on underlying structural tensions between him and the Soviets.
In the years after the mission, Marshall’s critics fixed on the first alternative: China was America’s to save, and it was Marshall’s failure to have lost it. The policymakers of the early Cold War, Lyndon Johnson argued in justifying his escalation in Asia, “had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over in China. . . . And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.” Some political figures went a step further, calling Vietnam an opportunity to pursue the course that should have been pursued in China a decade and a half before. Even into the 1980s, the analogy would maintain its grip, with the “loss” of China invoked as an argument for intervention elsewhere. (In a sense, the China mission was Washington’s first encounter with a lesson learned repeatedly through the Cold War and beyond: the near-impossibility of resolving somebody else’s civil war.) Reflecting on such arguments and what they wrought, the historian Ernest May proposed “that the whole course of the subsequent Cold War would have proceeded differently, abroad and at home, if Marshall had not personally acted to bar involvement in the Chinese civil war. Pressures for involvement were so strong that, had another person been President Truman’s principal adviser on national security policy, they could have been irresistible.”
Later, critics skeptical of hardened Cold War categories fixed on the second alternative approach. A more enlightened policy toward the Communists, the argument went, could have won them over as anti-Soviet allies a quarter century before Nixon ultimately did, with the help of Zhou Enlai. (Other key CCP figures from the time of the China mission also went on to play central roles in subsequent events, including Deng Xiaoping, China’s great economic reformer, and Xi Zhongxun, father of current Chinese president Xi Jinping.)
The historian Odd Arne Westad has called these the myths of the “loss” and the “lost chance,” both fanciful, both of them reassuring in their affirmation of American omnipotence. “It would not have been possible for the United States to prevent a Communist victory in China by military force, covert operations, or diplomatic initi
atives,” Westad wrote. Nor, given everything known of Mao, was a more conciliatory U.S. policy likely to have transformed him into an ally in the immediate aftermath of revolution.
Marshall came away with a more limited sense of America’s place in the story. A master of self-control, here he came to terms with what could not be controlled; a can-do man in a can-do era, here he learned what could not be done—the hardest part of strategy. Yet that did not mean settling into fatalism. Marshall also returned home with a deeper sense of what it would take to succeed in the larger struggle just beginning. In ways both positive and negative, the China mission would leave its mark on the model of American leadership he went on to build.
Again and again, Marshall was urged to tell his own story, to polish history so it reflected the record the way he wanted—as Churchill famously remarked, to ensure it would be kind. Again and again, Marshall refused, even when publishers offered him outlandish sums. Only with some persuasion, and late in his life, did he agree to give a series of interviews to a biographer.
For a leader so attentive to public debate when he was in the midst of a fight, military or diplomatic, this refusal might seem surprising. Marshall thought a memoir would have to be either disingenuous or gratuitously hurtful, and neither of those courses interested him. But even more important, he had long believed that fixating on judgments in the future would pervert his judgment in the present. During World War II, one particularly adamant suggestion that he keep a personal record for later use came from a Robert E. Lee biographer, who noted that Lee’s failure to define a legacy had allowed others to define it instead. Marshall wrote back to explain his reasons for not doing so:
It continually introduces the factor of one’s own reputation, the future appreciation of one’s daily decisions, which leads, I feel, subconsciously to self-deception or hesitations in reaching decisions. I realize that in the future I will probably be embarrassed by the lack of factual evidence or contemporary notes regarding this or that phase of the war as influenced from my office. If I in any way propagated such thoughts, it would inevitably affect the clarity and logic of my daily approach to the changing situation.
Marshall’s refusal to craft history is doubly striking because he so highly valued its study. It was the only subject at which he excelled in school. Even in the middle of the war, he read thick volumes on Napoleon and ancient Rome, and asked newspaper publishers to encourage Americans to study history’s “great lessons pertinent to the tragic problems of today.” Decades later, in a classic study of how decision makers use (and misuse) history, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May would single out Marshall for his ability to think in “time-streams”—drawing a web of connections between the present and the past in order to illuminate possible paths into the future. “By looking back,” they wrote, “Marshall looked ahead.”
Marshall knew history’s lessons were never clean or simple. He had seen how crudely or misleadingly they could be applied. “There always seem to be too many conflicting and disturbing factors for a calm appraisement, too much special pleading, too much violent prejudice,” he noted. Over and over he had watched other leaders act on “impressions retained from schooling in biased histories, poorly taught.” And yet history was, Marshall believed, of “great value in broadening my perspective and tempering my disposition.” It could serve as a corrective to the nostalgia-laden selective memory that sustains myth and warps perspective in the present by excising the wrenching choices and struggles of the past.
Today, as Americans agonize and argue over fears of national decline, the story of the China mission is in one sense sobering. Even at the height of its power, when it had just led the Allies to victory in World War II and accounted for nearly half of the global economy, America could not solve every problem. But the story should also be reassuring. In its moment of greatest leadership, America did not have to solve every problem to show that it was strong.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Marshall during World War I
(Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill at the 1943 Cairo conference, with Marshall looking on
(Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Chiang Kai-shek greets Marshall
(Associated Press)
The Committee of Three
(Associated Press)
The Chiangs toast Marshall
(Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall and Nationalist General Chang Chi-chung (Courtesy of John L. Soong Jr.)
Crowds greet the Committee of Three during its trip across North China
(Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall on the Yenan airstrip (Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall inspects Communist troops in Yenan, with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chang Chi-chung, and Zhu De (Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall and Mao at Communist headquarters in Yenan (Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall and Mao in Yenan (Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall and Madame Mao in Yenan (Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall’s house in Nanjing (Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall with the Chiangs and Dwight Eisenhower
(Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Katherine Marshall in Kuling (Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall and Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Kuling (Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Katherine Marshall and the Chiangs play croquet in Kuling
(Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
Marshall at his 66th birthday party, with John Leighton Stuart, T. V. Soong, and Chiang Kai-shek (Courtesy of the George C. Marshall Foundation, Lexington, Virginia)
A NOTE ON NAMES AND QUOTATIONS
For the sake of the reader’s ease, I have tried to use whichever English version of a Chinese name is most familiar to most Western readers. In some cases, this has resulted in an inconsistency or anachronism. (For example, Beijing at the time was known as Beiping—“northern wind” rather than “northern capital”—yet I use Beijing here.)
The material on and quotations from Marshall and his circle come largely from their own contemporaneous records—meeting notes, telegrams, memos, letters, and diary entries, all listed in the notes. In many cases, I have corrected misspellings and typos that are not telling in their own right. The central perspective of the narrative is an American one, and for the rest of the story I have relied on the many excellent historians who have written on the Chinese Civil War and early Cold War, and the many excellent biographers of other key figures in the story (as well as of Marshall). A full register of their works appears in the notes and bibliography.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Over five years of research and writing, I accumulated a long list of debts, most of which will never be properly repaid.
At the George C. Marshall Foundation, I’m grateful to Paul Barron and Jeffrey Kozak for their advice and help in the archives, as well as to Brian Shaw and Rob Havers for their support. Mark Stoler of the University of Vermont and Barry Machado of Washington & Lee generously shared their wisdom and deep knowledge whenever I asked. A number of excellent researchers—Nikki Weiner, Terry Sun, Jacob Glenn, Yanping Liu, John Chen, Chen Gong, Josh Hochman, and Rhys Dubin—provided crucial help at various points along the way. Thomas Sung, Rebecca Soong, and John L. Soong Jr. vividly recounted their personal experiences.
In China, I relied on the help of some people I knew already and many more that I was meeting for the first time, all
of them exceedingly generous. Peter Hessler, Jeff Wasserstrom, Emma Oxford, Maura Cunningham, Nicole Barnes, Charlie Edel, Ren Xiao Shan, and John Pomfret offered valuable contacts and advice. In Beijing, I had fascinating discussions with Niu Jun and Zhang Baijia, and benefited from the hospitality of Liu Gang. In Chongqing, Chen Guangmeng, Qian Feng, and Han Qing were immensely helpful, as were He Wen in Shaanxi and Xiong Hua Wu in Kuling. In Nanjing, Michael Zhang, Guo Biqiang, Xiao Zhencai, Dong Guoqiang, and Edmond Yang all gave lavishly of their time, knowledge, and enthusiasm. William Chan was a tremendous fellow traveler and intellectual partner—and deserves many additional thank-yous for his ongoing friendship and advocacy.
At New America, I’m thankful to Steve Coll, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Andres Martinez, Peter Bergen, Becky Shafer, and Kirsten Berg for building an unparalleled infrastructure and fostering an unparalleled environment for writers trying to make progress on first books. At NYU, Mike Williams supported the final stages. Jose Fernandez and Andrea Gabor lent me a beautiful place to write.
The China Mission Page 39