As with just about everything else pertaining to our policy in China, the arms embargo was mantled in deception. One of the more bizarre developments along these lines occurred in March of 1947, when the White House unveiled the “Truman doctrine” providing military aid to Greece and Turkey, both then under pressure from Communist forces. The President announced the new policy in vaulting terms about resisting Red aggression around the world—all this while the aid cutoff to Chiang continued.
The stark contrast between this doctrine and what was going on in China was brought out in House committee hearings when Dean Acheson as Under Secretary of State went up to Capitol Hill to explain the Truman program. At these hearings, Rep. Walter Judd (R-Minn.) asked the obvious question: Why provide military aid to oppose Red guerrillas in Greece, when we were doing the exact reverse in China? Acheson answered with one of the more disingenuous statements in an Orwellian record. “The Chinese government,” he said, “is not in the position at the present time that the Greek government is in. It is not approaching collapse. It is not threatened by defeat by the Communists.”15
This answer was the more astounding as it would be flatly contradicted in Acheson’s own white paper on China—explaining the China-Greece disjunction in terms of Chiang’s alleged failings rather than his unthreatened status. It was also the direct opposite of many backstage State Department assertions, then and later, that Chiang was a triage case whose life support should be suspended. Either way, in the Acheson view, Chiang would be denied assistance. If he was winning, he didn’t need it. If he was losing, he couldn’t use it.
Revealing also were events in early 1948, after the embargo had been lifted and a worried 80th Congress pushed through $125 million in emergency military aid for Chiang. At this point, the foot-dragging that preceded the embargo once more came into play. Gen. Claire Chennault, longtime Air Force commander in China, would testify that the first shipments of this aid, authorized in early April, didn’t reach Shanghai until December. Similar testimony was given by Admiral Oscar Badger, who in the summer of 1948 was part of a U.S. military observer group in northern China. Here KMT forces were anxiously awaiting the arms aid they knew was voted, in preparation for decisive battles. Again, however, the assistance was delayed, and wouldn’t arrive until late November.*236 16
A third episode offering a gleam of insight into the bottlenecks and slowdowns occurred early in 1949, when Truman, Acheson, and others in high administration councils decided further military aid to Chiang, though approved by Congress, should be halted—on the now-explicit premise that the KMT cause was hopeless. However, when Michigan GOP senator Arthur Vandenberg learned of this and threatened to make a public protest, Truman reversed his field and ordered that the aid go forward. In passing along these new instructions, Acheson told his State Department staffers, “It is desirable that shipments be delayed where possible to do so without formal action.”17 (Emphasis added.)
There have been debates down through the years as to whether and to what degree these measures affected the outcome of the civil war in China. The position of the Acheson forces, set forth in the white paper and court histories of the matter, was that neither the formal embargo nor other efforts to withhold aid to Chiang did any harm, that the aid provided was ample, and that he was bound to lose anyway because of his incompetence and corruption. We can hardly settle that question here—except to note that, if sabotage of the gold loan, imposition of the Marshall embargo, and other recurring aid denials didn’t seriously injure Chiang, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.
Nor would there be lack of trying later. In late 1949, with the fall of China and retreat of the KMT forces to the island of Formosa (Taiwan), one might suppose the State Department’s anti-Chiang jihad would be called off. It was, on the contrary, redoubled, as the Acheson forces were now determined to pursue Chiang to his island refuge and finish him for good. This effort proceeded along two divergent but complementary lines—one made public at the time, sufficiently astounding in its own right, the other a deep-dyed secret and even more amazing.
The public part of this vendetta was previewed at the State Department policy confab convened by Philip Jessup in October 1949, immediately following the Red takeover on the mainland. The main thrust of discussion at this meeting was that the fall of China was by no means the end of the process but merely a beginning; still other Communist advances in the region were expected, and the recommended policy for the United States was to stand back and let these happen. In particular, according to State’s Asia gurus, the United States should acquiesce in a Maoist invasion of Formosa—this to be followed by further renunciations elsewhere, most notably in South Korea.18
In short order, a good deal of what was recommended at this conclave would become official policy—most immediately with respect to the anticipated attack against Chiang in his island redoubt. By mid-November, Acheson was advising Truman that the new regime in Beijing should be accorded recognition and that “the United States should disengage completely from Chiang Kai-shek” on Formosa. By late December, the State Department was circulating policy guidance to its officials, saying “loss of the island is widely anticipated” and that it was necessary to dispel “the mistaken popular conception of its importance to the United States defense in the Pacific.”19
Shortly thereafter, on January 5, 1950, Truman made the write-off official, saying no military aid would be provided by the United States to help Chiang protect Formosa. A week after that, Acheson gave the policy its most famous expression in a speech before the National Press Club. In this talk, he explained that the United States was taking the moral high ground by not helping Chiang defend the island (because we would never interfere in the internal affairs of another nation), and described our “defense perimeter” in the Pacific in a way that excluded both Formosa and Korea. All in all, a pretty good approximation of major policy themes emerging from the Jessup chin-pull.20
While all this was going on, still other anti-Chiang maneuvering was under way, the details of which wouldn’t be known for decades. This involved a series of State Department plots aimed at removing Chiang from Formosa ourselves, either by application of American force and pressure or by fomenting a military coup against him. These plans had an ostensible rationale that differed sharply from Acheson’s public statements, but the end result in one crucial aspect would have been the same—lights out for Chiang.
In fact, such clandestine plotting against the anti-Communist leader was nothing novel, as there had been similar plans made during World War II. The central figure in these early schemes was Joe Stilwell, in 1944 waging his own nonstop vendetta against Chiang, assisted by such as John Stewart Service—whose poison pen letters home from China increasingly stressed the theme that the generalissimo should be abandoned. At this period, according to Stilwell’s deputy Frank Dorn, Vinegar Joe called him in and ordered him to craft a plan for Chiang’s exit from the scene by way of outright murder.
“I have been instructed,” Dorn quoted Stilwell, “to prepare a plan for the assassination of Chiang Kai-shek. The order did not say to kill him. It said to prepare a plan…The Big Boy [Roosevelt] is fed up with Chiang and his tantrums.” From Dorn’s phrasing, this seemed to mean the order came from FDR, though Dorn speculated it might have come from Harry Hopkins “or one of the senior officers in the Pentagon.” Dorn added that, after weighing several options, such a plan was in fact developed, involving the sabotage of a plane carrying Chiang and Mme. Chiang on a projected diplomatic mission.*237
Though Dorn was close to Stilwell and presumably knew whereof he spoke, the existence of so fantastic a plot might be considered doubtful had no other evidence on the matter surfaced. However, confirmation that such a Stilwell scheme did exist was provided in 1985 by OSS archivist Eric Saul, based on the records of that unit. This may have been the same assassination plan or a successor, as it involved the OSS, which Dorn didn’t mention. According to Saul, Stilwell was convinced that Chiang wa
s simply feathering his own political-financial nest and thus impeding the war effort in China. So Vinegar Joe “set Detachment 101 [of OSS] the task of taking Chiang out of the picture.”21
In the event, the top-level order to carry out the assassination wasn’t given, so Chiang managed to get through the war without being murdered by his U.S. allies. The animus against him nonetheless continued, in the dispatches of Service-Davies-Adler, efforts to deny arms and money to the KMT, and plotting to bring about Chiang’s overthrow once he landed on Formosa. There were multiple links between these State Department projects and the earlier schemes of Stilwell, including the fact that two of Vinegar Joe’s war-time helpers were on the Acheson team at State in 1949–50: John Paton Davies, formerly Stilwell’s political adviser, and Dean Rusk, deputy chief of staff to Dorn.
How long this State Department plotting had been going on isn’t clear, but plans seem to have been in a stage of relatively advanced preparation by the early weeks of 1950, which means they must have started fairly soon after the fall of the China mainland. The most explicit early reference to such scheming is a memo by State Department official W. W. Stuart, dated February 20, 1950, which says, “the following discussion of a United States cultivated coup d’etat on Formosa is concerned with the procedural aspects of such action” rather than the merits—indicating that the idea had already been mooted and that Stuart was simply considering ways and means.22 Thereafter, a whole raft of State Department policy papers would be cranked out on the subject, harping on the evils of Chiang, why he shouldn’t be allowed to continue on Formosa, and the urgent need to oust him.
After numerous pros and cons on how to get rid of Chiang had been kicked around by State Department policy planners, including John P. Davies, George Kennan, and Paul Nitze, Dean Rusk would produce a forty-page summa on the subject, capsuling alternative courses of action. This concluded that the best choices for U.S. policy makers were either to compel Chiang to abdicate by American edict or to sponsor a military coup against him. The State Department candidate for leading such a coup was a dissident KMT general named Sun Li-jen.
Rusk made it fairly clear that he favored the second option, which he expressed this way: “The U.S. should inform Sun Li-jen in the strictest confidence through a private emissary that the U.S. government is prepared to furnish him the necessary military aid and advice in the event that he wishes to stage a coup d’état for the purpose of establishing his military control of the island.” So, while the stated Acheson policy was that we couldn’t get involved in the internal affairs of another nation to help Chiang defend Formosa, we would be willing to get involved enough to overthrow him.*238 23
Of particular interest in all this was the role of Philip Jessup. In early 1950, while various anti-Chiang initiatives were being mooted in Foggy Bottom, Jessup was off on a “fact-finding” tour of Asia, including Formosa and Japan. It was on this journey, according to Gen. Louis Fortier of General MacArthur’s Tokyo staff, that Jessup spread the news of further renunciations in Asia through early recognition of the Red regime at Beijing. It was on this journey also that Jessup reported back to Acheson about the apparently weak state of Chiang’s defenses on Formosa.
In one report, Jessup said, inter alia, that “the Gimo’s†239 house is located quite high in the mountains but only about a 20-minute drive from the center of Taipei [capital city of Taiwan-Formosa]. There was one pillbox with one sentry in one of the many curves in the mountain road, and we saw a few soldiers about but there was no great military presence.”24 These Jessup comments, which might in other context be taken as sightseeing observations, assume a somewhat different meaning against the backdrop of State Department plans for toppling Chiang by military action.
In the end, as with the earlier Stilwell efforts, these schemes for a military rising on Formosa would come to naught. The fact that they occurred at all, however, tells us much about Dean Acheson and his State Department planners and their true place in the history of the Cold War. Quite obviously, there was an “immense conspiracy” afoot concerning China, and had been since the middle 1940s. Some of it was made public at the time, some of it was understandably quite secret. All of it, however, is well documented in official records, though ignored in most of the standard histories.25*240
COUP
In this May 1950 memo entitled “U.S. Policy Toward Formosa,” State Department official Dean Rusk details plans for a U.S.-sponsored coup d’état against America’s anti-Communist ally Chiang Kai-shek.
Source: State Department records, National Archives
A CONCLUDING thought concerns the timing of these events—leaving out the secret plots and looking strictly at the policy measures the State Department made public or more or less acknowledged. Mao had proclaimed his “People’s Republic of China” on October 1, 1949, and the Jessup policy confab at State mulling further Red advances was convened a few days later. By mid-November, Acheson was advising Truman to recognize Beijing and let Formosa go under. By late December, the State Department was predicting the “imminent fall” of the island and circulating policy guidance explaining why this need not concern us. On January 5, 1950, Truman made the default official, and seven days thereafter, Acheson told the Press Club, and the world, that both Formosa and Korea were beyond the line of our defenses.
From this hurried sequence, it’s evident the Service-Vincent-Jessup crowd was controlling U.S. policy in the Pacific, that more capitulations were in prospect, and that things were moving quickly to make these a fait accompli before too much dust had settled over the prostrate form of China. While some of this brought squawks from Congress, that apparently didn’t bother State’s planners unduly, as they briskly forged ahead with their various up-front and backstage schemes for Asia. As of the Acheson Press Club speech, the whole thing was falling rapidly into place and there didn’t seem to be any force on the horizon determined or strong enough to stop it. Four weeks later, a virtually unknown Joe McCarthy, expected to make a talk on housing or farm problems, stepped to the podium in Wheeling.
CHAPTER 32
The Battle with Benton
THE stock image of Joe McCarthy is that of zealous investigator, questioning witnesses, banging the gavel, ferreting out security risks real or imagined (in the conventional version, of course, strictly the latter), and otherwise pursuing suspects in his hunt for concealed subversives. And a good deal of this sort of thing did happen during his brief tenure as a committee chairman. The obverse of the picture, however, is that McCarthy spent as much time being investigated as he did investigating others. Indeed, during his tempestuous ride as America’s most famous Communist fighter, investigations of McCarthy proceeded on virtually a nonstop basis.
These anti-McCarthy inquests included: (1) the Tydings probe, which was supposed to investigate the State Department but which as seen was in its backstage doings actually an investigation of McCarthy; (2) an investigation of the 1950 Maryland Senate race in which Tydings was defeated for reelection by Republican John Marshall Butler; (3) an investigation spun off from the Maryland conflict, based on charges brought against McCarthy by Sen. William Benton (D-Conn.); (4) the famous Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954; and (5) the censure hearings run later that year by Sen. Arthur Watkins (R-Utah), leading to McCarthy’s condemnation by the Senate.
These investigations were in substance closely interwoven—especially the Tydings hearings, the Maryland inquest, the charges brought by Benton, and the Watkins sessions that preceded the vote of censure. Viewed together, these formed a continuing process that never ceased entirely, with each phase leading to the next and common elements persisting. (Ironically, the best-known of these investigations, the Army-McCarthy hearings, were something of a sidebar in terms of content, though undoubtedly contributing to the final outcome in the damage they inflicted on McCarthy.)
Of note in these investigations was the recurrence of the same issues and same cast of characters working up the charges, though subject to
certain modifications and substitutions. The most visible single player in the early going was Tydings, who continued to stay on the case long after his own hearings were concluded and also after he had been defeated for reelection. Following close behind was Benton, who had many grievances against McCarthy and a Javert-like obsession with the subject. Other significant players, by happenstance more than design, were senators Guy Gillette (D-Iowa), whose Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections conducted two of the investigations, and Mike Monroney (D-Okla.), a member of this panel, who chaired the Maryland inquiry.
Hovering in the background were unofficial helpers who worked closely with anti-McCarthy forces in the Senate, many staying the course throughout the investigations. These included the columnist Drew Pearson and his assistant Jack Anderson, reporters for the anti-McCarthy Milwaukee Journal and Madison Capital Times in Wisconsin, Kenneth Birkhead of the Democratic senatorial campaign committee, various associates of Benton, and—particularly in the later phases of the struggle—a liberal lobby group called the National Committee for an Effective Congress. There were others involved as well, but these were the people who worked with unflagging zeal across a span of years to discredit and bring down McCarthy.
Some particulars of the Tydings investigation have been recounted and would have important consequences later. Before these kicked in, however, Tydings himself would pay a price. In November of 1950, he was defeated for reelection, in a bitter contest, by Republican candidate Butler, a relatively unknown conservative Baltimore lawyer with a distinguished-sounding name. This was a fierce campaign marked by debate about the Communists-in-government issue and the conduct of the Tydings hearings, with substantial involvement on the side of Butler by McCarthy aides and allies. The defeat not unnaturally rankled with Tydings, who moved to make an issue of it in a complaint before the Senate, referred to the subcommittee run by Gillette.
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