Concerning all of which Senator Brewster would sum up as follows: “We have now three cases here, the first that of Senator Smith, who had this conversation in which he gained an impression [on the recognition question]; the next that of General Fortier, who had this conversation which he detailed, the third now of Mr. Stassen.”19 So in this case a three-to-nothing count was chalked up by the Senate umpires, not against McCarthy, but to the detriment of Jessup.
In the end, Jessup’s performance before the Sparkman panel proved shaky, conflicted, and unpersuasive. Both Gillette and Smith, after much agonizing on the subject, joined Brewster in voting against him, and so the nomination was rejected in committee. The McCarthy case the Tydings panel refused to hear had carried the day with two of the leading moderates in the Senate. It was by far the biggest trophy ever bagged directly by McCarthy. In the meantime, he was on the trail of even bigger game—a hunt in which his aim would be less true, despite the larger target.
CHAPTER 31
A Conspiracy So Immense
MCCARTHY’S most controversial speech, deplored by friend and foe alike, was his marathon 70,000-word indictment of Gen. George C. Marshall, presented to the Senate on June 14, 1951, later published in book form, slightly altered and expanded, as America’s Retreat from Victory.1
In going after Marshall, McCarthy was attacking a national icon, and thus bound to get himself in even more hot water than the simmering tub that was his usual daily portion. Pondering the policy blunders of the war and postwar era, he sought an analytical framework for the mournful data. Though apparently no one recalls it, McCarthy occasionally made other geopolitical speeches about the course of Cold War policy and why it was disastrous for our interests. Sometime in early 1951, he came across an explanation that seemed to solve the puzzle: the man responsible for all this woe was George C. Marshall—Truman’s Secretary of Defense, former Secretary of State, and Army Chief of Staff during World War II.
It was an open secret in the 1950s, and has been verified since, that this McCarthy speech was drafted by Forrest Davis, a prominent journalist of the era. Davis had prepared the manuscript as a writing of his own (it bears many earmarks of his style), but then gave it to McCarthy—who found in it the éclaircissement he was seeking.2 The thesis of the manuscript/speech/book was that Marshall, at every step along the way in World War II and the early postwar period, made choices that were not only wrong but served the ends of Moscow. The point was documented from the memoirs of key players in the events, a field of study well known to Davis.
The McCarthy-Davis speech reviewed some critical episodes of the war and wartime conclaves, mostly those in which Marshall was on the opposite side from England’s Winston Churchill and in agreement with the Russians. Among these was Stalin’s demand for an early “second front” in Europe, whereby Anglo-American forces would land on the northern coast of France, as against Churchill’s off-touted plan to move up through Italy to the “soft underbelly” of the Balkans. The Churchill scheme would have put U.S. and British forces into Eastern Europe rather than leaving that sector to the Russians. Marshall’s views, and the course taken, were closer to Stalin’s preference than to Churchill’s.*230
Next the speech considered the mysterious post–D-Day decision of U.S. officials to pull up short in Europe, letting the Soviets take both Berlin and Prague. This allowed Moscow to stake a de facto claim to half the continent and created countless problems for the West in maintaining access to Berlin. Responsibility for this, and much else that happened in Europe, McCarthy pinned on Marshall. McCarthy-Davis then considered issues hashed out at the Yalta conference in February 1945, with particular focus on whether concessions made there to Stalin were needed to involve him in the Pacific fighting. In some ways this was the most significant aspect of the speech, and of the blunders it was addressing.
FDR’s secret Yalta deal with Stalin, McCarthy noted, gave the Soviets control of Manchuria’s ports and railway system, while inviting them at virtually no cost to themselves to take possession of this all-important Chinese province. This handover of Manchuria, the speech asserted, was the basis for much that happened later in China, as the Soviets looted the province of Japanese arms and ammunition, then turned much of this plunder over to their Yenan allies.†231 The speech spotlighted the role of Marshall in this disastrous sequence and the China debacle that followed, most notably his mission there in 1946 on behalf of President Truman.
There were other topics covered, but these were the main ones. In every case, McCarthy argued, Marshall’s decisions and weight of counsel helped advance the Soviet cause and injured that of Western freedom. From the standpoint of the conventional wisdom, this was all of course outrageous. McCarthy, however, made the arraignment even more so by adding dicta that went beyond the general’s conduct to the question of his motives. In the most famous portions of the speech, McCarthy said:
How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black, that when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men….
And further:
What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and actions contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. If Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country’s interest.3
McCarthy has taken his lumps for giving this speech from just about everyone who ever made a comment on it. The criticism is deserved, but for reasons slightly different from those suggested in the standard treatments. For one thing, a good deal of what he had to say about the policy blunders was not only true but urgently important. The uproar about Marshall’s motives tended to obscure this. For another, McCarthy was quite right that an immense conspiracy was afoot—especially with regard to China—though erring as to the role of Marshall.
In discussing all this, it’s well to keep in mind that the Marshall speech was distinct from other McCarthy cases. In more typical instances, McCarthy’s point was that an Owen Lattimore or Philip Jessup not only held policy views that favored Yenan or Moscow but had pro-Red leanings and connections. There were no charges of this sort concerning Marshall. The case was made strictly on the basis of the policies he favored and their abysmal outcomes.
McCarthy’s reasoning here has been condemned not only by his many critics, but by his corporal’s guard of backers. Thus William Buckley and Brent Bozell took him to task in their still highly relevant book for the implicit syllogism that, because somebody made decisions that produced disasters, the decision maker must have wanted these to happen.4 Inferring subjective motives from objectively bad effects, said the authors, misreads the fallible nature of the species. That was true enough, up to a point and with some provisos. However, there was another, less subtle problem with the McCarthy enthymeme—in its factual predicates: that Marshall everywhere and always made wrong decisions or urged mistaken courses, and that in the trend of Cold War policy he was the ruling figure.
Without trying to rehash the long career of Marshall, a few examples may be cited to suggest the factual errors in McCarthy’s thesis. One such involved the modus vivendi dispute in the run-up to Pearl Harbor. As seen, oft-identified Soviet agents Harry White and Lauchlin Currie were opposed to any such stand-down in Asia, which would have disserved the cause of Moscow. According to all the data we have, Marshall as Army Chief of Staff was on the opposite side of this internal wrangle—for the excellent military reason that the truce being talked of would have given us extra time to improve our weak peacetime defenses before plunging into all-out conflict.5
Had Marshall been part of the White-Currie axis, he wouldn’t have taken such a view, whatever the military factors. In like manner, his bio
graphers tell us, he battled with Harry Hopkins about the diversion of U.S. ordnance to the Russians and British when this was needed by our forces. (He also reportedly fought Hopkins on the billeting of the pro-Soviet Col. Philip Faymonville to Moscow, another stance that wouldn’t have been taken by a Communist-lining Machiavelli.) There is the further point that Marshall’s strategic notions for Europe (though not for Asia) were endorsed by Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, a solid anti-Communist who served with Marshall and knew him well.*232 6
None of this, be it said, puts Marshall in the clear for the bad decisions with which he was connected—especially those involving China, which were very bad indeed. Here, however, the second axiom kicks in: that Marshall was the Moriarty behind the whole affair, concocting schemes that others followed. On occasion he may have done so, but usually Marshall wasn’t making policy but carrying out a line devised by others—following guidance from above, going along with his instructions, being a team player. These were obviously desirable qualities in a soldier; but when the policy thus created was an unrelieved disaster, as occurred in China, Marshall was complicit in the outcome.7
The axial period in the China-Marshall story was the fall of 1945, which brought the elevation of John Carter Vincent to the top of State’s Far East division and the resignation of Patrick Hurley as U.S. ambassador to China. Though initially naive about the nuances of the China struggle, Hurley knew blatant propaganda when he saw it, was outraged by the anti-Chiang material being cranked out by Service and John Davies, and demanded their recall from China. Like the Amerasia scandal that followed, Hurley’s charges against the China FSOs were a huge potential stumbling block to the project of sandbagging Chiang and talking up the rebels. Hurley’s comments were thus ignored entirely or ridiculed as the ravings of a blowhard. A proud man used to better treatment, he resigned in late November, to be replaced by Marshall.*233
Some three weeks later, Marshall was sent out to China, where he would be greeted by General Wedemeyer, who had succeeded the cantankerous Stilwell as U.S. military commander in the region. According to Wedemeyer, Marshall was fatigued and out of sorts and knew little of the byzantine complexities of the China tangle. Worse still, the old general was gruffly disinclined to hear much of anything Wedemeyer tried to tell him, especially the intractability of the Communist problem and the likelihood that efforts to smooth this over were doomed to failure.
Actually, Marshall did know something of the China conflict—or thought he did. As subsequent inquiry would reveal, he had by this time been well indoctrinated by forces opposing Chiang Kai-shek and congenial to Yenan. We need only note in this respect that he was the friend and patron of Stilwell, whose hatred of Chiang Kai-shek was boundless and who had had many opportunities to transmit this to Marshall. It would have been hard to find a mentor on China as hostile to Chiang or as friendly to the Yenan interest.
Unfortunately, Marshall was now given just such a mentor in the person of John Vincent, a close ally of Service and Soviet agent Lauchlin Currie, pal of Owen Lattimore, and leading member of the IPR group at State. A career FSO, Vincent through the years voiced some unusual views about East-West relations, the Soviet Union, and the struggle for control of Asia. In the latter 1930s, he had been a staunch supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, but in the 1940s turned bitterly against the Chungking leader. Vincent in the war years seethed with hostility to Chiang, expressed this in dispatches, and advanced the notion of using the lever of U.S. aid to force Chungking’s compliance with our wishes.8
Vincent’s efforts in prepping Marshall for his China mission were fully in keeping with this background. There would be some confusion and contradictory testimony about Marshall’s own input into the instructions that framed the purpose of his journey, but not much doubt about the role of Vincent. It was Vincent who in late November of 1945 supplied a background memo that put Marshall in the China picture and then played a leading part in drafting the general’s strange “directive”: a statement on the objects of the mission in the name of Secretary of State James Byrnes, plus two memos on the subject signed by Truman—the whole package bearing Vincent’s imprint and all given to Marshall for his guidance.9
Boiled down, the key provisos of these papers were that the goal of the mission was to achieve “peace and unity” in China; that to attain this, Chiang must come to terms with other political forces in the country (including—a telltale Vincent phrase—the “so-called Communists”); and that if this weren’t done, U.S. aid to Chiang would be suspended. (“A China disunited by civil strife,” said one Truman missive, “cannot be considered realistically as a proper place for American assistance.”) All this, despite some sinuosities of language, was simply a recap of the formula earlier spelled out by Solomon Adler in advices to Harry White: Use the bludgeon of U.S. aid to force Chiang into a coalition with the Reds, and if Chiang didn’t knuckle under such aid should be denied him.*234
If this weren’t enough to tilt the mission against Chiang, there were forces already on the ground in China to help advance the project. Among Marshall’s principal aides was Adler himself, who would brief the general on economic and financial matters, no doubt explaining who was responsible for China’s miseries and the merits of withholding aid from Chiang. (According to later findings of the Senate, Marshall so esteemed Adler’s advice he countermanded efforts to have the Treasury staffer sent elsewhere.)10
How many other Communist moles had tunneled into the Marshall China operation there is no way of telling, but the number seems to have been substantial. As the historian Maochun Yu observes, based on his study of the Beijing sources: “When George Marshall was in China, Communist penetration of American agencies was rampant….Many Chinese typists and interpreters…employed by the OSS and the Office of War Information were secret agents working for Yenan. As revealed in recent materials published in China, they stole U.S. documents, organized secret Communist activities, often forged intelligence, and fed American intelligence agencies in China falsified information…”11
As of December 1945 when Marshall arrived in China—in sharp contrast to what happened later—the Nationalists were winning their struggle with the Yenan rebels. At this period and in the early months of 1946, the Communists hadn’t had sufficient time to be equipped and trained adequately by their Soviet sponsors, and were on the run in northern China. Of course, a situation in which Chiang was fighting and winning wasn’t “peace and unity,” the idée fixe of Marshall’s mission. So Marshall’s most significant early move was to get Chiang to call off his armies—the first in a series of truces the Reds would agree to when they were losing.
In the judgment of such as Joe McCarthy, the McCarran panel, and China experts Anthony Kubek and Freda Utley, this Marshall effort to stay Chiang’s winning hand was foremost among a number of crucial measures that turned the tide in favor of Mao. Given the tough anti-Communist outlook of these sources, some such judgment might be expected. However, the identical view would be expressed by the Red Chinese themselves, as set forth in Jung Chang’s definitive study of Mao and his tactics. Jung Chang’s discussion of all this, titled “Saved by Washington,” informs us:
Marshall was to perform a monumental service for Mao. When Mao had his back to the wall in what could be called his Dunkirk in late spring 1946, Marshall put heavy and decisive pressure on Chiang to stop pursuing the Communists into Northern Manchuria…. Marshall’s diktat was probably the most important decision affecting the outcome of the civil war. The Reds who experienced that period, from Lin Biao to Army retirees, comment in private that this truce was a fatal mistake on Chiang’s part.12
Despite this and other Marshall truces, nothing could prevent the Reds and the KMT from waging what both knew was a death struggle, even if George Marshall didn’t. Accordingly, in July of 1946, as stipulated in his mission statement, Marshall dropped the hammer on Chiang. Continued fighting wasn’t “peace and unity,” so aid to the KMT would have to be suspended. Why peace and unity were absent didn’t mat
ter; even if the Communists were the culprits, as Marshall occasionally acknowledged they had been, U.S. sanctions would be imposed strictly on Chiang. (Against the Reds, of course, we had no such leverage, and the Soviets, for some reason, weren’t imposing similar sanctions on their Yenan allies.)*235
As would later be discovered, the Marshall arms embargo wasn’t anything new, but rather an extension of preexisting secret measures meant to hinder Chiang in his internal battles—the White-Adler sabotage of the gold loan providing the premier example. There had been backstage efforts to deny military aid as well, months before the embargo was adopted. As described by Col. L. B. Moody, an Army ordnance specialist who in the summer of 1945 inspected surplus munitions intended for the KMT, numerous steps were taken by U.S. officials handling these materials to prevent delivery.
These munitions were under the control of the Federal Economic Administration (successor to the Board of Economic Warfare). When the supplies were to be transferred to Chiang, said Moody, the “FEA took every conceivable action to block or delay shipment of this essential [material], quite likely taking its cue from Embassy officials.” Moody noted that, of 153,000 tons of ammunition supposedly meant for Chiang, only about 2 percent got through, “the rest being dumped in the ocean or otherwise disposed of.” Captured German rifles supposedly meant for Chiang were likewise interfered with. “One small shipment started,” said Moody, “and the project was cancelled on orders from Washington.”13
Subsequently, under the Marshall arms embargo, not only were the Nationalists prevented from buying weapons and ammunition, they were also barred from receiving munitions already purchased. To make the shutdown as complete as possible, the embargo was coordinated with the British, the most likely alternative suppliers of weapons and ammo to the anti-Communist armies. This policy was kept in place for almost a year—from the summer of 1946 until the late spring of 1947—and would be resumed, again by clandestine methods, in the months that followed.14
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