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BY THE FALL of 1950, Chiang Kai-shek’s dream of returning to the mainland was already hopeless, especially since no one on either side of the aisle in Congress, not even the most rabid Chiang supporters, wanted to take responsibility for sending American boys, quite possibly millions of them, to fight in China. Yet the dream of such a return was still very good politics, offering an endless free shot at the White House for its enemies. Their allies in the Chinese Nationalist embassy in Washington encouraged them, although if the top officials in the embassy had news and intelligence that might spell trouble for the United States, they did not always tell their American friends.
In the weeks before the Chinese entered the war, there were massive Communist troop movements toward the Chinese-Korean border. Senior Nationalist officials on Taiwan as well as in the Washington embassy had extremely good intelligence about these movements and, even more important, a rather sure sense about what the Communist government intended to do next. They knew how a Chinese government would respond to the crumbling situation in Korea, with American and South Korean armies racing for their border because it was just how they would have responded themselves. But in fact their intelligence was based on more than instinct. Some of their former colleagues during the civil war who had been dragooned into the Communist Army after their divisions had surrendered were still able to pass on by radio what they had learned of the plans of their Communist commanders. Thus, senior Chinese Nationalist officials had very good intelligence—from former Nationalist officers now in the Communist armies and from sympathetic workers in the Chinese rail system as well as other parts of the old governmental structure. They had a powerful sense of the collision about to take place, from the day the United Nations forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, and every bit of intelligence they received subsequently confirmed it. (We know this, in part, because some of their cables on this matter were eventually made public by a dissenter within the Washington embassy.) A Chinese entrance into the Korean War promised a conflict they badly wanted—any hope of a return to the mainland was premised by then on war with the new China. It was their only possible hope for a ticket back. So they were in no rush to alert their American allies about what was going to happen and thus allow them to avoid the consequences of such an encounter. Because the people in the Washington embassy were, by and large, more sophisticated on American matters than their counterparts back on Taiwan, they were at pains to tell those in Taiwan to keep cool and not to share this information with the Americans.
The importance of the Nationalist embassy in Washington cannot be underestimated, in no small part because of the sheer talent of its people, and in part because there was such an important faction of the American political right that wanted to amplify the views of the Nationalists. By 1948, to the degree that the government of Nationalist China existed at all, it did so more in Washington than in China, and its constituents were American politicians and journalists, not the ordinary people of China. It was in Washington that its smartest representatives, men like T. V. Soong and Wellington Koo, operated with great skill. In May 1949, Eric Sevareid of CBS, who had covered China during World War II, reported that “the Nationalist government has all but disintegrated. Its real headquarters, if it has any, is here in Washington where its lobbyists and American supporters are desperately busy trying to scare up another big American aid program for China.”
The forces driving the collision between the United States and China were more powerful than people on either side of the Pacific realized—and Taiwan had become, almost unbeknownst to the Americans, the great sticking point from the moment Chiang took up residence there. Even as Mao took power, America had already begun to separate itself from any ability to deal with him. The United States held back its recognition of his government, even as the principal U.S. allies, including the British, began to move toward it, thereby in many ways isolating America rather than the Chinese, while inevitably pushing them ever more firmly into Stalin’s arms. In addition, hanging on to Chiang meant defending and protecting him, which meant in the end defending and protecting the island of Taiwan. On its own, in the years before the denouement on the mainland, the Joint Chiefs had seen that island as being in no way critical to America’s national security. In March 1949, no less a figure than Douglas MacArthur had said, “There is no earthly military reason why we should need Formosa as a base,” a statement deliberately made public by the State Department (which did not exactly endear Dean Acheson to the Pacific commander). Strategic policies can change, of course. Taiwan now certainly had a higher value than before. But the reversal of that policy, the decision to defend Chiang and Taiwan, would have severe consequences. It might be viewed as a relatively minor adjustment by the administration to greatly different Asian needs, but it did not look that way to Mao and his followers. To them, it was a major affront. It kept them from making their country whole. The United States had, in effect, stepped between them and the completion of their revolution, at the very moment when the Americans were cutting off all conceivable channels of communications to them. That meant there was less wiggle room for both sides by the week. In Washington, the Truman administration was reacting by instinct and making what its officials thought was a minor geopolitical adjustment; to the victors on the mainland, what Washington was doing was making the liberation of all China impossible. In their eyes it was nothing less than the act of an implacable sworn enemy.
From the moment Chiang left the mainland, few things concerned the Chinese embassy and the China Lobby more than keeping the United States from recognizing Communist China. They succeeded so well that the recognition of China became an enduring domestic issue, one the Democrats feared even to touch for more than two decades. It would take President Richard Nixon, who as a young politician rode the idea that the Democrats were weak in dealing with the Communists to political power, and thus was himself relatively immune from red-baiting, to break the ice in February 1972 with a visit to China, one that no Democratic politician even then could have taken without quite possibly being red-baited by, among others, Richard Nixon. In the meantime, Americans were left to consider a curious question: Which country was China? Was it that vast nation of 500, and then 600 and soon 700, million people, or that small island off its coast with some 8 million people, 6 million of them Taiwanese and an estimated 2 million new arrivals from the mainland? It was, for a long time, an answer Americans could not get right.
The policy questions were the gravest imaginable: Were Taiwan and Chiang that important, if the very act of continuing the embrace of them might help inaugurate a new and more dangerous chapter in our relationship with a very important nation just coming of age in a new and largely unwelcome incarnation in Asia? Did we really owe anything more to a fallen leader who had systematically failed his own people, treated American military, political, and economic advice with contempt, and served as the major source of weapons for his sworn opponents? Was it worth taking the risk of driving this formidable nation, obviously an ascending power and a potentially dangerous one, and surely one day a great power, into the arms of a sworn enemy? Was it worth reinforcing Mao Zedong in his belief that the United States was but the newest imperial power with designs on his country? Were we willing to do exactly what Mao in some way wanted, playing to his paranoia about the United States and helping to harden his attitudes and policies against us? Those were the real questions of the moment, and the answers to all of them were almost all surely no. But they were also national security questions that were muffled at the time, outweighed as they were by domestic political forces and emotions. Our policy in the end was to continue to support a government that had already died.
No one sensed the future collision more clearly than John Melby, the young China Hand who had been so wise about so many other things as he witnessed the breakdown of Nationalist China. Melby was a fascinating figure; in 1945 he had been sent to China from the American embassy in Moscow at the specific suggesti
on of Averell Harriman, then the ambassador to the Soviet Union, to keep an eye on what the Russians were up to in that country. Melby soon became one of the embassy’s most despairing and impassioned anti-Chiang voices. He understood immediately that the popularity and success of the Communists had nothing to do with the Russians, that it was the Communists’ ability to respond to indigenous grievance and to the country’s latent nationalism that made them so formidable. That any relationship between the United States and Mao’s China would be extremely difficult he never doubted, but neither did he doubt that it was worth a serious try. In June 1948, a year before the final collapse of Chiang’s regime, he had written prophetically in his diary, “All the power of the United States will not stem the tides of Asia, but all the wisdom of which we are capable might conceivably make those tides a little more friendly to us than they are now.”
The decision in the days immediately following North Korea’s strike south, to move the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits, had been a fateful one, much more than the United States had realized. Mao knew he could not best the American military forces on sea and in the air, so when he finally chose to take on the United States, it would be in Korea, so much more accessible to a vast land-based army. His military could cross the Yalu on foot as they could not swim the Taiwan Straits. If the United States had drawn its line in those straits, Korea was by far the more convenient place for Mao to draw his.
Part Seven
Crossing the Parallel and Heading North
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ON THE AMERICAN side, the decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel and head north was in a way a decision that made itself. It was a decision that the senior civilian officials thought they would control when they finally faced it, but that in the end would control them. When the North Koreans invaded, Truman, Acheson, and Acheson’s people at State had simply not given much thought to what would happen if the tide of war turned and North Korea’s forces unraveled. Their first two months as a de facto war cabinet had been given over to sheer survival. Few minds were concentrated on the then almost abstract problem of what should be done if the way north were suddenly open. Now, post-Inchon, that question had suddenly become paramount. Suddenly the appetite for a larger victory had been whetted. The men who had so carefully controlled the decisions at Blair House back in late June had less control as an ever greater victory seemed possible. The crucial differences between senior civilian and military officials and MacArthur about overall agenda and in attitudes toward China, largely suppressed when the In Min Gun threatened to take over the entire country, now began to surface. Because the Communists had started the war by crossing what the Americans considered a border, because so many Americans had already died in Korea, and because the commander in the field had always wanted to go north, the decision was essentially foreordained. The more successful the United States was in the South, the harder it was to set limits going north.
Anyone who tried to limit an offensive into the North would be labeled an appeaser. In fact, Bill Knowland of California, one of the China Lobby’s most powerful spokesmen in the Senate, was already using the A-word. The cumulative force of several years of intensified Cold War rhetoric, words that summoned up a world divided between white and black in moral terms, contributed to the mandate to go north, even as the issues at stake tended to demand that people think in terms of gray. It was ever harder to be satisfied with a truncated, partial success, with the old, always unsatisfactory status quo. Part of the dynamic was military. It would have been hard to justify stopping at the thirty-eighth parallel and simply waiting for the other side to rebuild its forces and strike again. The more logical move militarily, and one that the Joint Chiefs eventually fell in behind, was to go a limited distance above the thirty-eighth, build up American airpower significantly, find the right piece of terrain that could be readily defended by artillery, dig in, make any additional assault unacceptable, and then work for a cease-fire. But that would have meant accepting a concept of limited victory in a limited war, and negotiating with people Americans otherwise refused to talk to. Nor was it just MacArthur who wanted to go farther north; if the other senior commanders often had their difficulties with him, then on this issue, they tended for a time at least to be unified—it is virtually a genetic condition among military men that when they have a chance for a breakthrough, they want to push ahead.
The decision to go north prompted a debate that was never really a debate; the forces pushing to cross the thirty-eighth were simply too strong. The most critical domestic change had taken place at the State Department, especially in the slow but systematic erosion of the influence of George Kennan. By the time they faced the decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel, he was not a major player anymore. He had believed that the risk of either the Soviets or the Chinese coming in was far too great if we tried to unite all of Korea. Paul Nitze, much influenced by Kennan on this single issue, agreed. Kennan was sure that we were heading toward a major crisis, that Washington did not have control of MacArthur, and that something terrible was going to happen. It was his personal policy nightmare: he felt the United States was overreaching militarily for something that did not matter and that would not improve our geopolitical position at all—and doing so at a fearful risk. But he was on the outside looking in by now.
Kennan was hardly alone in being sidelined. Acheson had been making his own political accommodations and battening down the hatches in the Far East section almost since he had taken over at State. Most of the China Hands, or people in charge of them, had been moved out—though Acheson did not like to admit it. He was too proud to let anyone know he was backing down on any issue for political reasons. He was exhausted by the political forces working against him on this issue, of trying to make the rather abstract case that Communism in China and Communism in Russia might be different. (About that time he revealed his frustration in a telling conversation with Clement Attlee, the British prime minister. He had been, he told Attlee, “probably more bloodied…than anyone else” in trying to distinguish between Soviet and Chinese intentions, and he thought it was no longer possible to act on the basis of a future split between the two Communist nations.)
As Acheson moved some of the China Hands out, more conservative men were moving in. The team at State, especially on Asia, was being changed very quickly. Dean Rusk, a quiet, centrist-conservative figure, a man of the bureaucracy itself, had become the administration’s key man on Asia. Rusk was the opposite of Kennan, who brought great knowledge about Russia and China to the table but was quite insensitive to the ever more pressing realities of domestic American politics. Rusk was acutely tuned to the latter and had much less feel for (and interest in) the former. He was exactly what Acheson wanted at a moment when concessions were needed. Rusk had volunteered to take a demotion from deputy undersecretary of state to assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs. “You get the Purple Heart and the Congressional Medal of Honor for this,” Acheson had told him at the time.
Rusk was to prove the most conventional of men in terms of his feelings about China. Later, during the Vietnam era, he became known as a notorious hard-liner on Asian Communism. But even in the summer of 1950, Rusk was already beginning to emerge as a hard-liner in the department, with views that would cause him no contemporary political problems; he believed the rise of Mao represented a historic change, “a shift in the balance of power in favor of Soviet Russia and to the disfavor of the United States.” Rusk, unlike Kennan, saw the Communist world as a monolithic entity. He had been one of the first senior people who argued for bringing John Foster Dulles into the State Department, and when that happened, he and Dulles quickly became allies over the importance of defending Taiwan. On May 18, 1950, Dulles had prepared a draft policy paper suggesting that Taiwan was as good a place as any to draw the line; twelve days later Rusk took the same position. They both painted the island as an attractive redoubt to defend because the United States could wield its long-range air and sea power effectiv
ely there, and the Soviets (and Chinese) could not bring their land forces effectively to bear.
Dulles’s reentry into the department was a controversial one, itself reflecting the fact that Truman and Acheson were seriously on the defensive against mounting Republican opposition. Dulles had been the shadow cabinet Republican secretary of state and Dewey’s chief foreign policy adviser, a man viewed as connected to the political forces of Eastern internationalism. Dewey’s 1948 defeat had been a bitter disappointment for him. He had then been appointed to a vacant Senate seat in New York, insisting that he would not run for election; then he decided to run for the seat anyway and, in a special election, lost to Herbert Lehman, the popular former governor, by nearly two hundred thousand votes out of nearly 5 million cast. With that, Dulles, wanting to get back into the world of public policy (and greater public visibility) and knowing there were more presidential elections still to come, started making overtures to the Democrats about some kind of role at State. He would, he told administration officials, help restrain some of the men on the Republican right like Senators Styles Bridges and Robert Taft, but only “if Truman allowed [him] to plan some early affirmative action against ‘the Communist menace.’” Not everyone wanted Dulles there—he was known for both his grandiosity and righteousness—but Acheson, hardly one of his admirers, gradually decided that tactically it was a smart move. When Acheson first mentioned it to Truman, the president exploded. Dulles had said too many harsh things about his domestic policies during the 1948 campaign. But Acheson, pushed on Dulles’s behalf by Arthur Vandenberg, the leading Republican internationalist, bided his time, then raised the idea with Truman again, and Dulles was finally assigned the Japanese Peace Treaty to work on. John Allison was assigned to work with him. Allison had served in Japan as a young foreign service officer, had briefly been interned in Japan after Pearl Harbor, and had become head of the Northern Asia office—a fortunate post, for it meant that he had not been caught in the political crossfire over China.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 44