The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  There were the first stirrings of domestic anti-Communism as an issue. Senators elected in 1946 were markedly both more conservative and anti-Communist as a group than the men defeated. In 1946 Richard Nixon had won a California house seat by comparing the voting record of his opponent to that of Vito Marcantonio, the left-wing New York congressman. The smell was in the air. In 1947, even as he was pronouncing the Truman Doctrine in foreign affairs, the President issued an executive order creating a Loyalty Security program which became the opening wedge for the security cases of the following years. Under the Truman decree the Attorney General drew up lists of subversive and front organizations; when questioned by friends who were uneasy about the direction and about this order, Truman replied that he had done it to take the play away from J. Parnell Thomas, who headed the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Truman’s friend Clifford Durr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission, asked the President about it, Truman replied that if there were injustices he could modify the order or repeal it.

  Rather than combating the irrationality of charges of softness on Communism and subversion, the Truman Administration, sure that it was the lesser of two evils, moved to expropriate the issue, as in a more subtle way it was already doing in foreign affairs. So the issue was legitimized; rather than being the property of the far right, which the centrist Republicans tolerated for obvious political benefits, it had even been picked up by the incumbent Democratic party. The first of the China security cases, that of John Stewart Service, took place in the Truman years. Yet in comparison to what was to come, this was all still quite mild.

  In 1948, normal domestic issues dominated the presidential campaign. Foreign policy did not become a major point because the Republicans did not choose to make it one, for a very good reason. They were very much a part of the existing policies, and more important, they did not think they needed the issue. Out of power for sixteen years, they were now confident, indeed overconfident, of victory; they felt themselves rich in Democratic scandals, and they overestimated the degree of unhappiness in the country. They also underestimated Truman as a political figure. He was so different from the graceful, attractive Roosevelt, patrician, the perfect voice for the radio age, generating through the airwaves a marvelous self-assurance that was politically contagious, his confidence becoming the nation’s confidence. After four defeats by Roosevelt, the Republicans were glad of the difference. In underestimating the political attractiveness of Truman, jaunty, unpretentious, decisive, his faults so obvious, they failed to realize that these were the faults of the common man and that the voter identified every bit as much with Truman’s faults as with his virtues. It was a campaign where the common man versus big-business interests was still a credible one, and Truman was a marvelous symbol of the average American, the little man. Every bit the consummate politician, he made the issue of anti-Communism partly his own, and shrewdly seized the liberal center, isolating both Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats. The Republicans mounted a frail campaign, in substance a me-too campaign, and they lost. They would learn their lesson and become less scrupulous the next time; by 1952, foreign policy and alleged softness of the State Department would be major issues.

  None of this had yet affected American policy toward Indochina, mainly because precious little policy toward it existed. What effect the rising domestic issue of anti-Communism had could not be good, but it was not yet bad. Then a major event took place in 1949 which meant that a French victory in Indochina was impossible, and yet, ironically and tragically, also meant that American support of the French was inevitable and that eventual U.S. entry into the war was a real possibility. The event was the fall of China and it was, again, produced by great historical forces outside our control; Barbara Tuchman would write in her book on General Joseph Stilwell in China: “In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.”

  As World War I had taken a decaying feudal Russian regime and finally destroyed it, bringing on the Communists, so Japan’s aggression against China, the first step in what was to become World War II, did the same thing to China: a fledgling semidemocratic government was trying to emerge from a dark and feudal past and was pushed beyond the point of cohesion, the Japanese catching Chiang Kai-shek when he might have moved into the modern era and frightening him back into the past, revealing more his weaknesses than his strengths. The embryo China of Chiang came apart, and the new China would not be that of Chiang and the Western powers, but of Mao Tse-tung and the Communists, a powerful modern antifeudal force touching the peasants and the age-old resentment against foreign intrusion, liberating powerful latent feelings in that great country. American policy had been to support Chiang, to try and use him as a force against the Japanese; later, as Chiang’s forces began to collapse and the Communists became a more viable force, we tried as best we could to reconcile the irreconcilable and get them to work together. The young American foreign service officers in China warned that we had to come to terms with the failure of Chiang’s order. It was a story which would repeat itself in Vietnam: of Chiang, as would later be true for many years of Diem, it would be said that he was too weak to rule and too strong to be overthrown. His forces were corrupt, his generals held title on the basis of nepotism and loyalty, his best troops never fought; faced by mounting terrible pressures, he turned inward to listen to the gentle words of trusted family and sycophants. It was the sign of a dying order.

  If the decay and erosion of Chiang’s forces were a historical force, so too was the rise of the new China. Produced in reaction to all the political sickness around, it reflected a new and harsh attempt to harness the resources of that huge and unharnessed land. The Communists were rising from the ashes of the old China, and they were in stark contrast to what had existed before. They were powerfully motivated, almost prim and puritan in their attitudes to the world, their view of corruption. On the mainland itself a brilliant group of young State Department officers were reporting the events with great insight, warning of the coming collapse of Chiang. The word “courageous” comes to mind to describe their reporting; but it was not applicable at the time. They were simply doing their job, reporting and forecasting as accurately as they could, which was very accurately indeed.

  By late 1944 and early 1945 it had become clear to some people high in the government and a few people in China that a major struggle was going to take place. Theodore H. White, then a young Time reporter, experienced both in American politics and Chinese affairs, had a dark and foreboding sense of the future (as well he might; his own excellent reporting on China would drive him from the Luce publications; White might have his China, but Mr. Luce had his China and he was not going to accept White’s version). By 1945 White knew that real civil war was inevitable, and when it came, Chiang would collapse and the Communists would win. White realized that this might affect the careers of some of his far-sighted friends in the foreign service when they reported developments as they saw them. He mentioned this to Raymond Ludden, one of the ablest of the young foreign service officers (they were so outstanding that Stilwell had simply taken the best of them from the embassy and attached them to his own staff): “You know something may happen because of this—a lot of people back home aren’t going to like the way it’s going.” And Ludden answered, “The duty of a foreign service officer is to report the truth as he sees it without adjusting it to American domestic considerations.” It was, White thought at the time, a wonderful answer. The sheer honesty and integrity of it moved him, but he was also made uneasy by it; wasn’t there a touch of innocence too? (There was: Ludden spent the rest of his career regarded by his superiors as being contaminated, and was moved around from different non-Asian post to post.)

  What White had begun to foresee in 1945 very quickly came true. As the China tragedy unfolded, many foreign service officers would have their careers destroyed, but of the group, John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service were the most distinguished, and as such they would s
uffer the most. Younger men a rank or two below them might quietly leave the Asian bureau and go to another area, their careers damaged but not entirely destroyed, but for Davies and Service, it was the end of two brilliant careers. For the country they served it would have even darker implications because they were the best of an era, and the foreign service does not produce that many men of rare excellence. They were the Asian counterparts of George Kennan, Chip Bohlen and Llewellyn Thompson; under normal conditions they might have stayed in, and by the time the Kennedy Administration arrived, become senior State Department officials, perhaps Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. They might have been able to provide that rarest of contributions in government: real expertise at a high operational level.

  By 1945 and 1946 it was clear that China would become something of a domestic political problem; the first glimmerings of a right-wing pro-Chiang force began to surface as a domestic political threat. The China officers were particularly vulnerable because of charges by Patrick Hurley, who had resigned as ambassador, that they had consciously and deliberately undermined him and that their sympathies were with the Communists. Hurley, unable to come to terms with the failure of his mission, the inability to reconcile the irreconcilable, had turned on his own staff—he was of course extremely influential with the Republican right, and now it seemed as if there were expert testimony against the State Department officials. In particular, the pressure against some of the younger officials increased, motivated by the belief of one faction of the military that it could all be done on the cheap, China might have been saved with air power, without the Americans having to pay any real price (again the divisions would be remarkably similar to those which later followed in Vietnam). The case for air power had always been made by General Claire Chennault, and his side was prosecuted with considerable skill in the inner chambers of the Administration by a young staff officer named Joseph Alsop, well connected in Washington with Harry Hopkins, and a distant cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt. Captain Alsop was intoxicated both by China and his own role in it, and he had turned out to be a very shrewd and forceful bureaucratic politician, playing a crucial role in the decision to recall Stilwell in 1944. (Service remembered years later that Alsop used to show up at the embassy in Chungking and say of Stilwell, “He should be drawn and quartered and flogged.” It was amazing, Service mused, when you consider that Stilwell was a four-star general and Alsop a captain, and although Stilwell had the embassy staff working for him, Alsop still outmaneuvered him.) Stilwell was replaced by General Albert Wedemeyer, who with Chennault formed the pro-Chiang group in Asia which had powerful ties with Republicans in this country. Stilwell was called back because he was blunt and open about Chiang’s failures; Wedemeyer made it a policy to get along with Chiang, which was fine except that it meant nothing, nothing moved, nothing happened. It was a good relationship, which went only one way, and soon Wedemeyer too began to complain to Marshall about the lack of co-operation he received from the Chinese.

  By 1947 the pressure on China began to mount. Giving in to the increasing opposition, Secretary of State Marshall lifted the embargo on shipment of munitions to China in May. When the U.S. Marines withdrew from China at the same time, they turned over their ammunition to the Nationalists. In July, General Wedemeyer was sent on a fact-finding mission, a small gesture to the opposition. In September, John Carter Vincent was relieved as Chief of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, to appease the Republicans and to protect him from the rising wave of Republican criticism. The contamination was reaching higher and higher; Vincent had been the foremost bureaucratic protector of the China and Asian experts, and the highest-level advocate at State of the colonized, pleading their case with fervor. (When he sat down to a dinner sometime in the late forties, he found himself introduced by the wife of the Dutch ambassador as “Mr. Vincent—you know, darling, the man who lost Indonesia for us.”) Vincent, though a senior State Department official, was sent overseas, but not as an ambassador, because that would require Senate approval. He was replaced by W. Walton Butterworth, a man specifically selected because he had no ties with Asia. He had handled U.S. economic interests in the Iberian Peninsula during the war and thus had unusually good credentials for handling a delicate political issue. Marshall trusted him as a steady and responsible man and seemingly immune from attacks from the right, since his Iberian work had made him a target for considerable abuse from the left, for having worked with those Fascist nations. Butterworth was clean and he intended to stay that way; he knew his orders from Marshall, which were that the United States was not to be dragged into a war in China. “Butterworth,” Marshall said to him, “we must not get sucked in. I would need five hundred thousand men to begin with, and it would be just the beginning.” Butterworth later remembered Marshall, the set of the face, like the M-G-M lion, adding, “And how would I extricate them?”

  Butterworth had been chosen because he was straight and conservative, but it was not the man who was contaminated, it was the issue; as pleasant, somewhat conservative Vincent was almost unemployable at the end of his tour, so was pleasant, conservative Butterworth. In 1950 he would be unable to take any job which required Senate confirmation (by that time Vincent was ticketed to be ambassador to Costa Rica, a seemingly safe spot, but his enemies still lurked, it was too risky, and he ended up in Tangier, where again confirmation was not necessary). When Butterworth took over, Vincent was already being questioned for loyalty. He was saved by family contacts with two powerful senators, Walter George of Georgia and Burnett Maybank of South Carolina, and the fact that Acheson knew him personally and vouched for him. “I know John Carter Vincent and there is no substance to this,” Acheson said at the time. (A few years later, when McCarthy brought loyalty charges against Vincent, by then in Switzerland, his defense counsel would have a good deal of difficulty getting Vincent to prepare his case. “He took the attitude that if things had reached this point, if even he could be considered a Communist, the hell with it; the world was going to the dogs and there was nothing to be done about it. So all he wanted to do was go off and play golf,” recalled his counsel, Bernard Fensterwald, Jr.)

  If Acheson felt a sense of personal commitment to Vincent, Dulles was hardly eager to maintain it. These China people, after all, were causing him problems, and there was no doubt about it in his mind, they had been naÏve. Once when Dulles was with Vincent, he pulled down a copy of Stalin’s Problems of Leninism, and asked if Vincent had read it. Vincent said he had not. “If you had read it, you would not have advocated the policies you did in China,” Dulles said. So it was that almost as soon as Dulles took over, he made sure Vincent was removed from the profession. A special review board created by Truman and headed by Judge Learned Hand was studying Vincent’s loyalty case at the time Dulles took office. Dulles told Judge Hand that his services were not needed, and ruled himself that while there was no “reasonable doubt as to the loyalty” of Vincent, he had demonstrated “a failure to meet the standard which is demanded of a Foreign Service Officer of his experience and responsibility at this critical time. I do not think he can usefully continue to serve the U.S. as a Foreign Service Officer.” Dulles offered him the choice of being fired or retiring, and Vincent applied for retirement.

  Service was not as lucky, if that is the word, as Vincent. He was not as well connected, and he did not know Acheson personally, which was vital in determining the Secretary’s attitude, so when a security board recommended against Service on what were extremely dubious charges, which the courts later overruled, Acheson separated Service by sundown. It was a decision made by the Truman Administration, though there is no reference to it in Acheson’s long treatment of the McCarthy period in his Present at the Creation.

  Much of the heat had been mounting even before China fell, but when Chiang collapsed completely in 1949 and the Communists took over, the impact really began to be felt. To America, China was a special country, different from other countries. India could have fallen, or an African
nation, and the reaction would not have been the same. For the American missionaries loved China; it was, by and large, more exciting than Peoria, had a better life style and did not lack for worthy pagans to be converted; add to that the special quality of China, a great culture, great food, great charm, and the special relationship was cemented. The Chinese were puritanical, clean, hard-working, reverent, cheerful, all the virtues Americans most admired. And so a myth had grown up, a myth not necessarily supported by the facts, of the very special U.S.-China relationship. We helped them and led them, and in turn they loved us. A myth fed by millions of pennies put in thousands of church plates by little children to support the missionaries in their work in this exotic land which was lusting for Christianity. China was good; the Chinese were very different from us, and yet they were like us; what could be at once more romantic, yet safer. The Japanese were bad, more suspicious and could not be trusted. The Chinese were good and could be trusted.

  Thus, after a war filled with intensified propaganda, movies showing Japanese raping China, American fighting units saving Chinese, Chinese nurses saving wounded American pilots and, of course, falling in love with them, the fall of China was a shock. What had happened to the Chinese who loved us? It certified, as it were, an even harder peace, it necessitated the reorientation of our demonology (from the wartime of Good Russians, Bad Germans and Good Chinese, Bad Japanese to the postwar period of Good Germans, Bad Russians, Good Japanese, Bad Chinese). It caught this country psychologically unprepared. It was natural for a confused country to look for scapegoats and conspiracies; it was easier than admitting that there were things outside your control and that the world was an imperfect place in which to live.