The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  About no subject did he become more obsessive, or more partisan. When Luce and his wife, the writer and politician Clare Boothe Luce, visited the Gimo and Missimo in 1941, he came away writing that he “had made the acquaintance of two people, a man and a woman, who out of all the millions now living, will be remembered for centuries and centuries.” More than any other American, Luce romanticized (and popularized) the modernism that Chiang supposedly represented. No other American was as influential in creating the illusion of a China under Chiang that wanted to be like America. If Chiang’s government had been only partially as successful and effective and noble as it was portrayed in the pages of Luce’s publications, if Chiang had only had a modicum of the talent that Luce attributed to him, there would have been no China crisis, and the Communists would have been easily defeated.

  Nothing could dissuade him not merely of the idea that China wanted a destiny shaped by Americans but of the notion that Chiang and his family were the people to lead the way. Any American political figure who dared get in his way would be destroyed; any information that his talented Time and Life reporters in the field came up with that revealed the systematic failures of Chiang and the steady rise of the Communists was almost surely going to be censored. No amount of evidence about why Chiang had failed could change his mind—instead he turned ever more venomously on those who collected it. For a long time he hoped that the Korean War might be the way to help bring Chiang back to the mainland. “Harry,” his sister, Elisabeth Moore, once told Alan Brinkley, his biographer, “was always looking for the opportunity to overthrow the communist regime in China. He knew that the United States could not simply declare war on the communists, but he thought that the wars the communists started could give us the opportunity to go into China. Part of him really wanted the Korean War to become an American war with China, and he talked about Vietnam in the early 1950s in the same way.”

  Whether he was a true blue China Lobby member was a fascinating question. Certainly on this one most compelling issue there was an instant solidarity, and he was by far the most important member of the China front. But for the most part he and the other China Lobby people were strange bedfellows. “He was,” wrote Brinkley, “more an enabler for them than a real member. He was a genuine internationalist and they were for the most part, and on most issues, isolationists.” Most of them were deep down more likely to be the constituents of Colonel Robert McCormick, and McCormick, the leading isolationist of an era, was a political enemy, constantly mocked in Luce’s pages. For McCormick, Luce was also normally the enemy, the man who had helped secure the Republican nomination for Wendell Willkie, then Tom Dewey (twice), and finally Dwight Eisenhower. What nonetheless bound them in a rather temporary embrace was China.

  Luce’s hatred of Acheson because of China became almost pathological. In private he would refer to him as “that bastard.” When the North Koreans first crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, he felt vindicated, and ordered his editorial writers to produce what John Shaw Billings, the first editor of Life and for more than two decades one of the most important editorial figures in the Luce empire, noted was to be a “self-serving-I-told-you-so editorial on the reversal of Truman’s policy towards China.” From the moment the Korean War started, Time had Acheson in its sights, and by January 1951 it wrote of him, “What people thought of Dean Gooderham Acheson ranged from the proposition that he was a fellow traveler, or a wool brained sower of ‘seeds of jackassery,’ or an abysmally uncomprehending man, or a warmonger who was taking the U.S. into a world war, to the warm, if not so audible defense that he was a great Secretary of State.”

  Both Time and Life, though more sophisticated than most of their competitors, could, when it truly mattered—in time for presidential elections for example—become naked instruments of their publisher’s will. Rarely was the political bias of the Luce publications so clear, however, as in their coverage of China. Luce did his part for the China Firsters by, among other things, censoring or suppressing the reporting out of China by a man who was arguably his greatest journalist of that period, Theodore White. It might be that Luce could not turn night into day, but he most assuredly could take White’s dispatches in the field describing defeat after defeat and turn them into reports on victory after victory. White by then had become accustomed to having his work completely rewritten. He had once put a sign on his office door saying, “Any resemblance to what is written here and what is printed in Time magazine is purely coincidental.” Theirs had been a constant battle—both loved China, but White thought of Chiang as a complete failure and believed that China had to find itself and emerge in a new incarnation all its own. In the fall of 1944, when the struggle between Chiang and Stilwell had reached its height and Roosevelt had decided to relieve him, the general had summoned two influential reporters whom he trusted, White and Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, for a prolonged interview on why he was being called back and why China’s cause was so hopeless. For both White and Atkinson it was a great journalistic moment: “This ignorant son of a bitch has never wanted to fight the Japanese…. Every major blunder of this war is traceable to Chiang.” The story was so big that Atkinson had flown out with Stilwell a few days later on the general’s plane, to make sure he avoided the censors, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting; White’s thirteen-page report was turned absolutely upside down and made, in his words, “so fanciful, so violently pro-Chiang that it could only mislead American opinion—which it was Luce’s duty and mine to guard against.”

  The administration had been on the defensive about China and subversion from almost the moment World War II ended. At home Truman, under pressure from the right, toughened the government’s loyalty and security procedures. In foreign affairs, the China Hands were now conveniently blamed for the very events they had warned were about to take place. In retrospect they would be viewed as one of the most brilliant and talented groups of foreign service officers the State Department ever sent to a foreign venue. But starting in the mid-1940s, off they were packed to Liverpool and Dublin and Switzerland and Peru and British Columbia and Norway and New Zealand. Ray Ludden, one of the more talented of them, went in short order from Dublin to Brussels to Paris to Stockholm—anywhere but Asia. “From 1949 on I was just putting in my time,” he once said. “I couldn’t get a job as dog-catcher.” In time their personal tragedies became their country’s tragedy, as the government made itself blind in an area that would become so important—and where it was critically important, because the forces at play were so volatile and revolutionary, to separate what you did not like from what threatened you. None of the China Hands was a real player in October 1950 when American forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel heading north, and none would be a player when the key Vietnam decisions were made some fifteen years later.

  In the beginning, the purge had been aimed at relatively low-and middle-level officials, but by 1948, the China Lobby people were desperate, ready and willing to go after bigger game. And perhaps the best way of understanding that period when the political debate became so bitter and ugly is to consider that the China Lobby leadership next chose to turn its energies against George Catlett Marshall. He had been a friend of China as a young man, had served there as a young officer, and had always retained that sense of friendship, so that when Madame Chiang came to the United States in late 1948 to plead her case both in Washington and with the American public, she had stayed with the Marshalls in Virginia. Marshall had turned away from Chiang reluctantly, not out of personal pique but because it was so obvious that his China was dying and could not be resuscitated and because Marshall placed the interests of the United States above those of Chiang. It was, he understood, the most fateful and difficult of decisions—giving up on an ally and accepting as the victor in the Chinese civil war an alien, hostile leadership likely to make the world a more difficult and dangerous place. That his patriotism was now under attack because of Chiang’s collapse told more about the era than about Marshall him
self.

  In 1945, when World War II had ended, if there was one American who seemed to stand above any partisan issue and to have earned the gratitude of the entire nation it was George Marshall, the most selfless and least ideological of men, “the great one of the age,” in Truman’s admiring words. He had, by then, been the primary architect of America’s amazingly quick mobilization during World War II. He had taken a small, pathetic, understrength, and under-equipped Army that reflected the country’s innocence and isolationism in 1941 and shaped it into the mighty force that crossed the English Channel only two and a half years later. Many ordinary Americans agreed with the president that Marshall seemed, at war’s end, the greatest living American; some military people, like Matt Ridgway, thought of him as the greatest American to wear the uniform since George Washington. It was a reflection of the vast divide China had created in American politics that, only five years later, as the man who had been the final arbiter of aid to Chiang, even Marshall was vulnerable, not merely his judgments but his very patriotism questioned.

  During World War II, Time had always been lavish in its praise of Marshall. The case against him then needed an explanation on the part of his enemies, of why he had turned against the Gimo. The answer, first articulated by the ever deft Wellington Koo in the Washington embassy, was simple: Marshall had become bitter and disenchanted because he had failed so dismally in his mission to that country. It was a poor answer containing no small amount of irony, for if there was ever a public servant who separated duty from ego, it was Marshall. Yet even that would not be enough. Luce’s Time let him know in a March 1947 cover story that he was about to undergo a new kind of scrutiny. Had he continued to favor aid to China, there would have been no limit to the adjectives used to describe him—he would have been portrayed as the most Spartan of men, cool, decisive, knowledgeable, ready to do in a time of peace what he had done so skillfully in a time of war. Instead, Time asked a single, ominous question: “Is Marshall big enough for the gigantic task ahead of him?” It was a warning shot: get aboard, or we will take you out. More, there was a vitally important additional coda: if Luce and the China Lobby could damage the reputation or at least neutralize someone as towering as Marshall, then it was open season on everyone.

  In mid-May 1947, Luce met with Wellington Koo, and much of their talk was given over to Marshall. By then Koo knew—from his own talks with Marshall a few days earlier—that the secretary of state feared that the Nationalists were already a lost cause. In effect, it was Koo who decided that they had a Marshall problem. Luce was more optimistic, because Marshall had been an ally in so many other battles. He was sure, he told Koo, that Marshall of all people understood the threat of Communism as others in the Truman administration did not. Luce was very firm: Marshall would understand what Luce called “the great inconsistency between his China policy and the present U.S. world policy.” Koo said Luce told him, “Either he [Marshall] would change the China policy by bringing it into harmony with U.S. world policy or he would be discredited.” “If he did not change it,” Koo added, “Mr. Luce told me, Time magazine, which he controlled, would point out the inconsistencies. But Luce believed George Marshall would change the policy, that he was too intelligent not to.”

  When Marshall did not bend to the will of the China Lobby and the needs of the Luce empire, the line became that he himself was not a leftist or a Communist, but that he had shielded others at the State Department who were. Worse yet, he was getting his information—his lessons on China—from the wrong people. Or as Indiana’s Senator William Jenner, a sub-McCarthy McCarthy, eventually put it: “General Marshall is not only willing, he is eager to play the role of a front man for traitors. The truth is this is no new role for him, for General George C. Marshall is a living lie.” When someone eventually mentioned Jenner’s attack to him, Marshall later said, “Jenner? Jenner? I do not believe I know the man.”

  If discrediting the people who were seen as discrediting Chiang was one part of Luce’s attempt to keep his regime viable in American political terms, then the other part was no less shrewdly targeted. The idea again originated with Wellington Koo. The Chinese embassy people were aware not only of their own growing isolation from the Truman administration but of the administration’s thin support on the issue that was central to its own vision of an enlightened foreign policy: greater collective security in Europe. Administration officials were uniformly intent on stabilizing the war-damaged European economies through the Marshall Plan, and Greece and Turkey via what became known as the Truman Doctrine, all as a bulwark against possible Soviet expansionism. It was Koo’s idea to tie aid to China to all other foreign policy bills. From now on, there would be no aid to Greece and Turkey, no money for European recovery, without a Chinese aid kicker. “Are we men in Europe and mice in Asia?” Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, one of the most forceful, asked during a Senate hearing, and it was a perfect description of the new position of the Asia Firsters. For the Truman administration, increasingly besieged and lacking broad national support for its foreign aid packages, it was a kind of political blackmail.

  THE SPECIFIC ISSUE being used against Truman was China, but the assault was far broader than that. Much of the anger that had been collecting came out of the Midwest, from people who were instinctively, indeed passionately, Anglophobic and who had felt during the world war that Americans had been brought in to settle someone else’s mess, and that all subsequent U.S. efforts to build up an exhausted postwar Europe were nothing more than America trying to do England’s work for it. These Midwestern conservatives did not see the rebuilding of Europe as part of a new self-interest in a world where, because of modern weaponry, the Atlantic Ocean had shrunk. They were, as Thomas Christensen, a Princeton professor, called them, Asialationists. It was as if each party had its own ocean. The Pacific, wrote Richard Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger in 1951, had long been the Republican ocean; the Atlantic, the Democratic one. Even Bob Taft, normally wary of any foreign entanglements, seemed to favor the Pacific. “I believe very strongly that the Far East is ultimately even more important to our future peace than is Europe.” The Republicans who were challenging the administration on China had little stake in U.S. policies of recent years. The Democrats, as John Spanier, a prominent political scientist, shrewdly pointed out, had never involved any leading Republican congressional figure in their policy making on China. When Chiang’s forces began to collapse, Senator Brien McMahon, a Connecticut Democrat and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, decided to check out whether there had been any Republican senatorial dissent from official policy in the crucial years from 1947 to 1949. He found not a single suggestion for a changed China policy from any member; nor had any Republican ever stood up in the House or Senate and advocated sending American combat troops there to support Chiang. They had had no answer to the questions Senator Tom Connally of Texas, one of Truman’s defenders, had asked his Republican colleague Arthur Vandenberg, “Would you send your own sons to fight in the Chinese Civil War?”

  That question was one Vandenberg, a critical bipartisan figure of the period, was already wrestling with as his party began to split apart in those days. He was one of the centrist Republicans who was becoming very nervous about the far right’s exploitation of the China issue even as Chiang continued to collapse. It might, Vandenberg warned some of his colleagues, become a two-edged blade if the GOP came to power. Thus, in September 1948 Vandenberg, a potential secretary of state if the Republicans won, wrote to Senator Bill Knowland, one of the leading China Firsters, warning him against pushing the China issue too hard, lest the Republicans soon inherit it. “It is easy,” he wrote, “to sympathize with Chiang as I always have, and still do. But it is quite another thing to plan resultful aid short of armed American aid and with American combat troops when practically all of our American-trained and American-equipped divisions surrender without firing a shot.”

  So the loss of China was merely the visible part of the icebe
rg, the issue that might help them recover control of the country, making it once again their America. Theirs was the America of the turn of the century, an America of sound business practices and old-fashioned virtues, of which they were exemplars. They did not owe money and did not depend on the government to employ them. They were the town leaders in an era when that leadership was almost exclusively white, male, and Protestant, and they were largely professional men, in an age when the middle class was still narrow. They belonged to civic clubs where almost everyone they knew felt much as they did about the drift of the country away from what they considered Americanism. The New Deal—and the forces that it had opened the door to—was the enemy. Or, as Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska had said before the 1946 election, “If the New Deal is still in control of the Congress after the election, it will owe that control to the Communist Party in this country.” These men were instinctively nativist, believing it a strength, not a weakness. They neither liked nor trusted the America that had elected Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the big-city America of Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and unions. They distrusted anything or anyone that was different; and now it was time to get even. Roosevelt’s America was a them and worse, a them that had run the country for almost twenty years.