American policymakers held out hope for nationalism-fueled friction between the Soviets and Chinese. When the State Department gathered officials and academics, including a now-retired Marshall, for advice after Mao’s victory, they stressed the need to “exploit . . . any rifts” between the two Communist camps. “Even if the devil himself runs China,” Acheson would conclude, at least he should be “an independent devil.”
Mao went out of his way to dash those hopes. He responded to American feelers about a relationship by imprisoning diplomats. “It is not possible to sit on the fence,” he reassured Stalin, who was as wary of CCP independence as Americans were wishful. Truman would concede, “The Russians cannot dominate [the Chinese] forever, but that is a long-range view and does not help us just now.”
By now Mao had reason to be grateful to Moscow, despite frustrations with its restrained approach through the first years of civil war. Although Soviet aid to Mao never matched American aid to Chiang, it reached substantial levels in the fight’s final phase. More important, Mao and his comrades were true believers in the cause they shared with Moscow. “They were Communists, they were Marxists,” Marshall had recognized, and “they did not make any pretense of not being associated with the Communists of Russia.”
In the wake of victory, Mao’s actions at home were similarly unambiguous. Within a few years, more than a million actual or suspected enemies of the revolution would be killed, often by flagrantly cruel means, and many more imprisoned. Businesses would be shuttered, free speech suppressed, a Soviet-style legal system established. Predictions by American diplomats and journalists that the Chinese Communists would turn into mere “agrarian democrats” proved laughable.
For Stalin, Mao’s victory induced a surge of revolutionary euphoria. When the Communist leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, asked for permission to invade South Korea, Stalin, despite having said no before, said yes. What had changed was China. Now Mao could help Kim if necessary. (Proving that hopes of Sino-Soviet strain were not entirely unreasonable, some Chinese Communists thought Stalin was deliberately entrapping Mao in a quagmire.) And American refusal to intervene in China (and a recent speech by Acheson) suggested Washington would stay out of Korea as well.
Stalin’s calculation turned out to be wrong. When North Korean troops attacked in June 1950, the United States quickly sent troops to defend the South, as part of a multinational force under United Nations auspices but with MacArthur in command.‡ Not only were circumstances different from those in China—on the Korean peninsula, one country had invaded another—but the shocks of the previous year had brought about a new American posture.
A few days later, Truman appeared in person at Marshall’s door in Leesburg. He needed to drag Marshall out of retirement again, this time to oversee America’s nascent war effort as secretary of defense. Whatever his personal feelings, Marshall’s sense of duty kicked in once again. (“When the President motors down and sits under our oaks and tells me of his difficulties, he has me at a disadvantage.”) Yet Marshall hesitated to accept for another reason. “They are still charging me with the downfall of Chiang’s government in China,” he cautioned the president. “I want to help, not hurt you.” When that failed to dissuade Truman, Marshall agreed to serve for six months.
As he feared, his selection this time was met not with universal acclaim, but with acrimony. “It should be remembered that as a diplomat Marshall did much to lose the war which as a soldier he had done so much to win,” charged Senator Joseph McCarthy. “General George C. Marshall is a living lie,” declared Senator William Jenner, “a front man for traitors.” (Marshall’s response: “Jenner? Jenner? I do not believe I know the man.”) Yet Marshall was ultimately confirmed, and in September 1950, his 70th birthday approaching, he found himself presiding over another war. Before long, there would be more than 200,000 American troops in Korea.
The fight against North Korea was immediately hard going, as Marshall knew a land war in Asia would be. Soon it became even tougher. MacArthur, emboldened by an audacious amphibious landing behind enemy lines, rushed troops northward toward the border with Manchuria (despite orders not to provoke the Soviets or Chinese). Mao did not stand by, and just weeks after Marshall’s return to the Pentagon, tens of thousands of Chinese troops poured into Korea to support their comrades. Less than five years since the two of them toasted peace in Yenan, Marshall’s army was at war with Mao’s.
There was also strife on the home front. The rush northward had been one in a string of actions by MacArthur that contravened Washington’s orders. He had complained openly about the scope of his mission. He had told reporters that defeating the Chinese Communists would be easy if only the politicians would let him take the fight to Chinese territory. The last straw was a letter read on the floor of Congress (calling for, among other things, unleashing Chiang’s Nationalist armies on the People’s Republic). Truman fired him for insubordination—promptly setting off another round of recrimination. For the China Lobby, Korea had become another battle in the “unfinished China war,” in Congressman Judd’s words, and MacArthur was now its martyr.
“If we lose this war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable,” MacArthur wrote in the letter that brought his downfall. “There is no substitute for victory.”
It was the kind of rousing slogan Marshall considered alluring but treacherous, calls to win a single battle at any price undercutting the “cold-blooded calculation and wisdom and foresight” needed to win the bigger war. Even while overseeing the effort in Korea, Marshall was adamant in his reminders to keep the global picture in mind. (Korea was “a very small peninsula,” he would note, and “the Soviet Union’s activities cover pretty much the whole world.”) When China joined the fight, he suspected “a carefully laid Russian trap” meant to draw the United States into a quagmire and open the way for Soviet moves on other fronts. Countering demands to extend the fight to “Red China” itself, Marshall shared the view that it would be “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
MacArthur’s response was to savage the China mission. Despite his praise of Marshall’s efforts at the time, now MacArthur pronounced it “one of the greatest blunders in American diplomatic history for which the free world is now paying in blood and disaster and will in all probability continue to do so indefinitely.”
On a fall day in 1951, Marshall returned to his house in Leesburg. He had arrived here six years earlier on another fall day, only to have his hours-old retirement interrupted by a phone call from the president. Since that call, he had spent thirteen months struggling to bring unity out of chaos in China; two years refashioning America’s global role as secretary of state; and a year overseeing another terrible war as secretary of defense.
Four decades in the army, spanning two global conflicts, had taught Marshall that there was no such thing as an easy war. These past six years had taught him that there was no such thing as an easy peace. The next great war, he warned, would bring only the “empty triumph of inheriting the responsibility for a shattered world.” Yet a peace that was merely the absence of war could not hold. Peace had to be a “dynamic force,” reinforced by both awareness of war’s costs and readiness to fight should fighting become necessary.
A sustained peace also meant reckoning with the deeper currents that Marshall had come to see. As he would write: “The benighted people, the little people of the earth, have begun to realize how tragic their situation is, how unfair. The Communists seize this growing revolt as a spring-board for their own purposes. They use it. We have largely ignored it through the years, with all our kindly and generous feelings toward our fellow men. Much of our present troubles spring from this source.”
But those troubles would no longer be Marshall’s to manage. “You have earned your retirement many fold,” Truman wrote him. This time there would be no interruption. From here on, Marshall would spend his days working in the garden, and riding in the hills, and read
ing beneath landscapes painted by Madame Chiang in her Taiwanese exile. He would lead a delegation to Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, and, in 1953, become the first American military man to win the Nobel Peace Prize. (“This does not seem as remarkable to me as it quite evidently appears to others,” he said in his address. “I know a great deal of the horrors and tragedies of war.”) But he would never return to government service. And he would never write his memoirs, despite lucrative offers from publishers. He was too concerned about the people he would hurt if he wrote the truth.
Yet as Marshall gradually withdrew from public life, American politics took a dark turn—spurred in significant part by the “loss” of China. Marshall was far from spared. Even before he stepped down from the Pentagon, Joe McCarthy had taken to the floor of the Senate to spin a tale of Marshall’s treason, with “the criminal folly of the disastrous Marshall Mission” at its center. “If Marshall were merely stupid,” McCarthy sneered, “the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country’s interest.” The only explanation, accordingly, was “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.” (McCarthy thought so highly of his three-hour ghostwritten rant that he had it published as a book, America’s Retreat from Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall.)
The charges were risible—the greatest of the Greatest Generation half-knowingly involved in a Communist plot—but in the fervid atmosphere of the day, they got traction. McCarthy saw traitors everywhere: in academia, in Hollywood, throughout the U.S. government. Some of those named were guilty of passing information to Moscow; many more were not, especially among the China hands who had earlier incurred Patrick Hurley’s wrath and now found themselves targets of McCarthy’s inquisition. That included John Melby, who after a prolonged investigation (focused largely on his affair with Lillian Hellman, the recipient of his love letters from China and an outspoken leftist) was expelled from the foreign service.
Others joined in McCarthy’s crusade. Wedemeyer helped quietly at first, and then, having whispered darkly about Marshall ever since the canceled ambassadorship, went public. Wedemeyer’s self-congratulatory memoir alleged that exhaustion and intellectual shortcomings had made Marshall “easy prey to crypto-Communists, or Communist sympathizing sycophants, who played on his vanity to accomplish their own ends.” Marshall’s China mission, according to Wedemeyer, caused the Nationalists to become “so disheartened and demoralized by our attitude that they finally ceased to resist the Communists.” No matter that much in this narrative contradicted what he said at the time, whether in his own sycophantic letters to Marshall or his own report about Chiang’s prospects. The memoir was meant, said Wedemeyer’s former deputy in an inadvertently damning defense, “as an apology and not to be completely factual.”
The more surprising betrayal came from Eisenhower, who had been recruited by the Republican Party to run in the 1952 presidential election. When it came time to campaign in Wisconsin alongside Joe McCarthy, Eisenhower had his speechwriter prepare a denunciation of McCarthyism—“a sobering lesson in the way freedom should not defend itself”—but then lost courage and left the material out. When he got in front of the crowd, he shook hands with McCarthy and blamed the “loss” of China on “men whose brains were confused by the opiate of this deceit,” doing nothing to defend the man to whom he owed his rise against a demagogue’s charges of treason. “General Marshall was responsible for his whole career,” an incensed Truman would say. “Eisenhower sold him out.”
Marshall himself did not get angry enough to have to forgive. He knew politics was a “dirty business.” He wrote Eisenhower: “I felt because of the vigorous attacks on me by various Republicans any communication with you might be . . . detrimental to your cause.” Upon Eisenhower’s victory, Marshall wrote a gracious note, with one piece of advice: “I pray especially for you in the choice of those to be near you. That choice, more than anything else, will determine the problems of the years and the record of history. Make them measure up to your standards.”
Only Katherine could detect any underlying hurt in her stoic husband; she conspired with one of his former aides, Frank McCarthy, who contacted the new president and suggested saying something in defense of Marshall. (“I know how sensitive General Marshall is to activities of his friends,” McCarthy reported back to Katherine, “so I am sending these messages directly to you with the suggestion that you show them to General Marshall only if you think he would like to see them.”) From the White House, Eisenhower would praise Marshall lavishly. And before long, Eisenhower, too, would be savaged for being weak on Communism.
To Marshall, engaging accusations at all, even in self-defense, would serve only to dignify his accusers and demean himself. He was not rattled by the rantings of men like McCarthy and Jenner, or the fictions of onetime acolytes like Wedemeyer. “If I have to explain at this point that I am not a traitor to the United States,” he would say, “I hardly think it’s worth it.” Only when it was necessary to stand up for others did he enter the fight. Vouching for former aides and colleagues charged with disloyalty, Marshall issued a warning: McCarthy’s accusations and insinuations “confuse our friends abroad, undermine and weaken our position before the world and actually lend assistance to the powers that would destroy us.”
At the height of the McCarthyist fury, one of the most renowned anti-Communist voices in America rose to Marshall’s defense. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr cautioned against “desperation on our side which would tempt us to confront Communism in Asia primarily in military terms and thus play into the hands of the Communist political propaganda by which it would expand still further into Asia.” It was “difficult to sit by with folded hands,” he wrote. “Yet we may have to learn to fold our hands.”
Niebuhr was best known for his Serenity Prayer: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. In a sense, Marshall’s core strategic principle echoed Niebuhr’s invocation.
Yet both Niebuhr and Marshall knew that the fact that something could not be changed did not make it any less terrible: that was the tragic implication of both the principle and the prayer. Within a few years of Communist victory in China, any remaining illusions about Mao—his ideology, his cruelty, his revolutionary ambition—had been stripped away entirely. War in Korea had dragged on into 1953, leaving millions of Chinese and Koreans (and 37,000 Americans) dead. Within China’s borders, Mao’s victims also numbered in the millions; his nascent attempt at forced industrialization and collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, would lead to a famine that killed tens of millions more.
In retirement, Marshall heard often from Madame Chiang, who sent both personal and political updates. He worked to help refugees from Communist China, and pushed for asylum for friends and contacts forced to flee Mao. (Katherine brought her maid and nurse from Nanjing to Leesburg, and helped her get American citizenship a few years later.) He signed a petition against Communist China’s admission to the United Nations, his name appearing alongside those of some of his most slanderous accusers. From the U.S. perspective, the only bright spot was that, less than a decade since Mao’s victory, the relationship between the Soviets and the Chinese had already soured. But the Cold War delirium made it hard for most Americans to see the split, and impossible for those who did see to capitalize on it.
The question—who lost China?—echoed through American politics for years. The China Lobby remained forceful and feared. A right-wing fringe found its namesake in John Birch, the young OSS agent killed in an encounter with Chinese Communists weeks after the end of World War II, and the John Birch Society became the country’s primary purveyor of conspiracy theory and fevered accusation. (In the imaginings of the Birchers, even Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”) Swaths of the U.S. government remained gutted by McCarthyism, almost anyone with regional expertise drive
n out in a cloud of suspicion; when Averell Harriman took over the State Department’s Asia section as the American effort in Vietnam expanded, he found it a “wasteland.” U.S. officials made trips to Vietnam and returned to recommend a few thousand more military “advisers,” then a few thousand more. Meanwhile, leaders fretted over the political fallout of “losing” another Asian country to Communism. “God almighty,” said Lyndon Johnson as he agonized over Vietnam, “what they said about us leaving China would just be warming up compared to what they’d say now.”
Marshall died on October 16, 1959, following a long deterioration punctuated by two strokes. In obituaries, the tally of achievements was long: building the modern American army and leading it to victory in World War II; forging the Marshall Plan and a model of global leadership that would long outlast him; standing as an exemplar of decency and dignity in one of the American body politic’s lowest moments. President Truman called Marshall “the greatest of the great in our time.” President Eisenhower spoke of his “steadfast courage and wise decision.” George Kennan praised him as “the American gentleman at his best—honorable, courteous, devoid of arrogance, exacting of others but even more of himself.”
When Chiang heard the news, he reflected on Marshall’s “stubbornness” and speculated that Marshall’s demise was a by-product of guilt. “Is his death a good thing for the revival of the Chinese nation?” Chiang wondered. He initially refused to sign a condolence note drafted by Madame Chiang. But then he read what she had written about Marshall. “She only tries to console his wife, but does not mention the good or bad deeds of the deceased,” Chiang recorded in his diary. “So we sent the letter in both of our names.”
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