So was Marshall. The Nationalist offensive had been more successful than he had anticipated—at least in the short term. To his mind, however, an opening burst of success did not change the Nationalists’ basic strategic problem. Claiming cities was not the same as establishing control. Even driven into the hinterlands, the Communists retained “almost unlimited room in which to maneuver,” judged an American military attaché. They were escaping Nationalist assaults with their armies largely intact. And as Mao had long envisioned, and Marshall could see, Nationalist lines were stretching to the point of peril.
Even in the best-case scenario, the Communists would remain able to disrupt and destabilize Nationalist power. American intelligence assessed that the fall of Zhangjiakou “has made it eminently clear that the Chinese National Government has the military capability to occupy any large city in China.” But once it did, “guerrilla warfare . . . would threaten the Nationalist consolidation of communications lines and the stabilization of China’s economy.” In the worst case, Communist strikes might prove effective enough to reverse recent Nationalist gains, and then some.
“How exhausting,” Chiang sighed as Marshall lectured him about these risks. For months, Chiang had hoped again and again that Marshall would finally see the light. Maybe Nationalist military victories would bring him around; maybe the “cold shoulder” he had gotten from Zhou in Shanghai would. Again and again, Chiang was disappointed. “Marshall’s attitude has been extremely horrible and it is beyond the tolerance of many people,” Chiang complained as his forces continued to take ground. “But I can tolerate the kind of embarrassment he cannot.”
Indeed, Chiang was no less willful than Marshall. He had chosen his course; he did not intend to diverge from it again. Not even stopping the flow of American arms and ammunition would change that. It angered Chiang, but it did not especially constrain him. “My state and I will not be threatened by either violence or wealth,” he declared to his diary. He had been well supplied over the previous year, and in the long run, he was confident that friends in Washington would take care of him, no matter what was said by Marshall and Truman and their colleagues—the “FDR party,” Chiang called them. When T. V. Soong urged him to call off an attack in order to avoid angering the Americans, Chiang rejected the advice out of hand: he “would not be influenced by Marshall’s mood.”
Marshall was aware that his mood was not particularly agreeable. “My endurance has about reached the limit,” he snapped in one discussion. He lamented the “unhappy duty” of “the middle man” and the testy tone of every meeting. He complained about private comments and confidential letters showing up in print, sometimes in a matter of hours. (Aides joked: “If you want to have the widest possible circulation you give it to the Chinese and mark it top secret.”) When he heard griping from one side about the treachery of the other, he resorted to an American idiom: “Chickens come home to roost.”
With both sides, Marshall had tried his most dramatic moves yet. With Chiang, he had requested recall; Chiang gave ground, but barely. With Zhou, Marshall had made a surprise personal appeal, and it had failed. Weeks after Marshall’s ambush, Zhou was still in Shanghai.
Marshall strained to keep up a good face in front of his aides. As pressure mounted, he had started getting a massage every morning, and Katherine thought he looked heartier than he had in a while. But in letters home, he did not hide his desperation to be somewhere else. “My ambitions, which grow more urgent every day, point to a quiet life in Leesburg and Pinehurst,” he wrote a friend. He had heard little about the secretary of state position since his initial communication with Eisenhower; perhaps, he hoped, Truman had dropped the idea.
“The general objective of all concerned,” Melby noted a few days after the Nationalist takeover of Zhangjiakou, “seems to be to end in such a way as to place the blame for the break on someone else.” The dynamic had become increasingly apparent. For both Nationalists and Communists, the question was no longer whether Marshall would fail. It was how and when that failure would come, and whose fault it would appear to be. To the extent they still spoke of peace, it was meant largely as a stratagem in the growing war.
In private, Communist leaders were explicit about the endgame. “The struggle has come to the last stage, during which the focus is on the United States,” Zhou had concluded. With Communist troops retreating from Zhangjiakou, Mao sent him new instructions: “You should just educate the masses, show them that the responsibility for a rupture is not ours, and resolutely expose the U.S.-Chiang Kai-shek fraud.” A few days later, Emancipation Daily published a front-page rundown of everything the CCP had been willing to do for the sake of peace, “so that everyone could see who was responsible for this complete final break.”
For the Nationalists, the concern was not just blame among their own people; it was also blame among Americans. “Marshall’s attitude is serious,” T. V. Soong would say. “If he goes back now he will be bitter and it could harm us.” It was a point that John Beal had been trying to drive home to Chiang’s advisers. He stressed that the Communist plan was “to let the government take, or refuse to take, the action which compels Marshall finally to bring his mission to an end.” The Nationalists thus had to do anything necessary “to let [the Communists] break up the Marshall mission if it has come to that.” Continued aggression would “give the Communists a propaganda base from which they can resurrect themselves, over a period of time, from their military defeat.”
As far as Marshall was concerned, there was already plenty of blame to go around. Each side had pressed its advantage in moments of apparent success, then come back newly obliging when momentum started to reverse—“both a serious Communist mistake and a serious Government mistake,” Marshall said, “a very human reaction though a very short-sighted one.” Other American officials, in trying to assign responsibility for outbreaks in a widening swath of the country, threw up their hands. “It is impossible to decide, with any degree of certainty, just who started what,” a military report conceded.
The fixation on blame also meant that neither side would tell Marshall definitively that his cause was hopeless—out of considerations, he was told, of saving face. “I am not interested in face,” he responded. “I am only interested in peace in China.”
The one faction that still seemed to share that interest was the third-party leadership. Marshall continued to look to them more and more as acrimony grew, and they urged him not to give up. The breakdown had spurred them to take the initiative, or at least to try, and Marshall encouraged them: if they acted together as one, they could become the swing vote and force both sides to come to the table and compromise. They were now, he said, “the great hope.”
The views he heard from them resonated. China needed “a democratic republic of the people, for the people, and by the people”; a coalition government would constrain the worst tendencies of both sides; good governance and development would vanquish Communism for good—but “as long as there is poverty, there will be Communists in China.” Acting on these premises, the third-party figures could, Marshall hoped, revive negotiations on a peaceful way forward. They had been working with Sun Fo, Sun Yat-sen’s eldest son and a source of frequent liberal dissent within Nationalist ranks, to coax Zhou back from Shanghai.
While the third-party leaders lobbied Zhou, Marshall tried new arguments on the other side. Months earlier, Chiang had explained that he first had to show toughness and then could afford to show generosity. Was it time for that generosity, Marshall suggested, now that the Nationalists had taken most of the ground Chiang had insisted he needed to feel secure? Could he make a magnanimous statement to show he had tried everything for the sake of peace? Otherwise, the only thing left would be “the spirit of revenge.”
What Chiang offered in response was a list of ultimatums, “jumbled in thought and provocative in nature,” Marshall judged. Caughey caught him after an encounter with Chiang and found him “heart sick.” As Caughey reflected, “so much
depends on a few words—the fate of a Nation, the fate of Nations, in fact.”
On a hot and dry late October morning, the leaves yellowing and a restless wind raising dust from Nanjing’s streets, Zhou appeared unannounced on the steps of #5 Ning Hai Road. It had been more than two weeks since Marshall sprang from behind the screen in Shanghai, and they had not seen one another since. Marshall agreed to meet immediately.
Zhou had landed in Nanjing a few days before, striding across the airfield, fedora in hand and tie neatly knotted, with third-party representatives at his side. After days of pleading, they had persuaded him to return. The CCP put out a statement: it was “as ready to save the country which is on the verge of a split as a man is ready to save his deathly sick mother. Whenever there is a last ray of hope, the Communists would be ready to do their utmost.”
Yet as Zhou returned, other Communists were leaving in ominous numbers. “Rapidly the Communist staff here and in Shanghai is being reduced to skeleton size,” observed Melby. At the Executive Headquarters in Beijing, CCP representation had declined by almost two-thirds, leaving the operation more paralyzed than ever. “There is an increasing belief,” reported the New York Times, “that the Communists, reluctant to enter the Government in their weakened military position and openly distrustful of American policy, are ‘sitting out’ General Marshall’s mission in the hope that the impasse will create a situation from which they might gain new international props.”
On Ning Hai Road, Zhou rejected out of hand any plausible means of achieving a pause. He seemed more interested in threats. “The Communists have never surrendered—not even in 1927 when they had no rifles in their hands,” he said. “How can they expect us to surrender now?” There was no reason to, he explained to Marshall. The Nationalists might think they were winning. But many places that appeared to be under their control were in fact “weak points,” which “could be very well exploited to our advantage.” On that point, Marshall knew Zhou was right.
To further complicate matters, Zhou’s return to Nanjing had coincided with Chiang’s departure. The Generalissimo was on his first visit to Taiwan—officially an “inspection tour,” although he had also taken note of the island’s possibilities as a refuge. He had assured Marshall that he would be back soon, and that if summoned, he would be back within four hours. Yet just as he had in Manchuria in the spring, Chiang stayed away longer than promised. When he returned, days late, Marshall did not conceal his frustration.
“I can make no predictions favorable or unfavorable,” Marshall reported to the White House as the end of October approached. “The state of peace appears at times more difficult than the state of war.”
On the last day of the month, Chiang turned 60.† Chinese astrology marked it as a significant birthday, and he considered it an auspicious moment for a last great act: a final push to take care of the Communist problem once and for all.
A few days beforehand, Henry Luce had landed in Nanjing. He had come on Chiang’s invitation and was received with as much pomp as any visiting dignitary. There was a procession of lavish meals, glowing toasts, and high-level briefings—all befitting Luce’s status as one of Chiang’s most powerful champions in the United States.
Luce had given Marshall plenty of advice and encouragement over the previous months. Just a few weeks earlier, he had invited him to address a Time-sponsored forum on world affairs; no one, Luce said, could better speak on the question “What Should America Do in the Far East?” (Marshall declined on the grounds that the situation was too unsettled to allow for planning anything more than five days in advance.) Luce’s publications had heaped praise on Marshall and his efforts.
The day Luce arrived in Nanjing, Marshall saw him at a dinner hosted by T. V. Soong, over a table of abalone, pigeon eggs, and shark fin. Luce explained that the Nationalist position was better than anyone thought. Top officials had shown him secret reports that offered a decidedly upbeat view of the military balance; the Communist problem, he related, required nothing more than mopping up. He also shared news from the United States: the Republicans were poised for a major victory in congressional elections the following week, and likely in the 1948 presidential election as well.
On Chiang’s birthday a few days later, Marshall found himself with Luce again. Madame Chiang had planned a surprise excursion for her husband, amid opulent celebrations around China. (A billion firecrackers were reportedly set off, and air force planes spelled out “six ten longevity” in the sky over Nanjing.) The Chiangs, the Marshalls, Luce, and a few aides and officers boarded a private train to Tai Lake, one hundred miles east of Nanjing in the Yangtze delta. There was Chinese checkers and bridge, lunch on a barge, a stroll on a quiet island. When they returned to the train car, locals greeted the party with banners and cheers. Marshall watched Chiang. He seemed genuinely moved by the display, and said it was his happiest day in a decade.
But on the trip back to Nanjing, when Luce got going on China, Marshall changed the subject. He worried Luce had been “taken for a ride,” accepting with little question what he was told and unable to separate personal sentiment from strategic judgment. “Luce has warm friendship for the Generalissimo and quite evidently is much impressed by the Generalissimo’s statements,” Marshall would note. “I am fond of the Generalissimo but recognize unmistakably the state of mind and governmental procedures which are the opposite of our desires. So, in effect, I stand between the rock and the whirlpool.”
Yet Marshall knew that what Luce said held great appeal for Chiang and his generals. They tended to listen most carefully to those Americans whose messages they most wanted to hear.
Time soon ran a story about Chiang’s birthday: “If the Generalissimo was happy, it was not because peace was in sight, but rather because the recent success of his armies has convinced many doubters that China can be unified by military means.”
* Westerners knew the city as Kalgan.
† As the Chinese counted it. By the American count, he was turning 59.
CHAPTER 14
At the Point of a Gun
As predicted, the November American election was a bloodbath. Democrats lost eleven seats in the Senate and fifty-four in the House. Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since before the Great Depression, claiming commanding majorities and sweeping in a wave of brash newcomers. A young judge named Joseph McCarthy felled a moderate incumbent senator in Wisconsin. A lawyer named Richard Nixon won in California’s 12th district.
Republicans framed the election as a referendum on the president. To err is Truman, the line went, and it was both potent and obvious. His approval rating had fallen from more than 80 percent to barely 30 percent in just over a year.
Yet if attacks were ardent, they were not especially coherent. Taxing and spending were the sins voters cared about most, and Republicans made much of them, promising to cut taxes by a full 20 percent. But alleged weakness in the face of Communist aggression—“appeasing Russia,” charged Senator Robert Taft—also proved a rich target. Challengers called the race “a fight between Americanism and Communism.” (Even candidates from Truman’s own party, including John F. Kennedy, a 29-year-old Massachusetts Democrat, found advantage in this approach.) Altogether the critiques presented a picture of an administration both doing too little and spending too much.
GOP TRIUMPH SENDS A CHILL THRU VODKA SET, proclaimed a postelection headline. The new Congress’s first move, however, would be to cut spending. Strength abroad might be a winning electoral maxim, but that did not make it a fiscal priority.
For months Truman had bemoaned this contradiction—the grandstanding about expansive ends while wildly slashing means. Since the war, he had been pressing Congress to slow demobilization and sustain defense spending, with little success. The run-up to the November election had only heightened his concern, as the tensions of a new age sharpened.
In late September, the tensions had exploded within Truman’s own cabinet. Henry Wallace, T
ruman’s secretary of commerce and predecessor as vice president, publicly attacked U.S. policy and called for a more conciliatory approach to Moscow, “even at the expense of risking epithets of appeasement.” Truman demanded Wallace’s resignation and replaced him with Averell Harriman, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union—a consolidation, it was said, of the “get tough with Russia” camp in the administration.
A few days later, the tensions exploded within the United Nations Security Council, the body conceived as a forum for the wartime Allies to keep the postwar peace. At a Council meeting in New York, Soviet representative Andrei Gromyko stood and denounced the United States as an occupying power. At the center of his denunciation was the U.S. troop presence in China.
Then, the day after that, Truman received a highly restricted report that two aides, Clark Clifford and George Elsey, had begun drafting over the summer at his request. They had gathered the thoughts of top officials and distilled them into a bleak prophecy of prolonged US-Soviet hostility. From Europe to the Middle East to Asia, Moscow was “seeking wherever possible to weaken the military position and the influence of the United States abroad as, for example, in China.” They called on their country to do anything necessary, including “wage atomic and biological warfare,” to demonstrate that it was “too strong to be beaten and too determined to be frightened.”
It was a grim elaboration on the telegram George Kennan had dictated in bed in Moscow half a year earlier. Then Kennan had been a voice in the wilderness. Now he was the most eloquent exponent of an emerging consensus; Clifford and Elsey quoted him at length. Back in Washington, his tour in the Soviet Union over, Kennan had recently started speaking about the need “to contain [the Soviets] both militarily and politically for a long time to come.”
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