The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  With the Manchurian city of Shenyang about to fall in late October 1948, Colonel Dave Barrett, the assistant military attaché, and John Melby went to the airport in the capital, Nanjing, hoping to hop a plane north to survey the contested areas. But no planes were going north. They had all been commandeered to bring out the Nationalist generals, their girlfriends, and their personal wealth. Barrett turned to Melby: “John, I’ve seen all I need to see. When the generals begin to evacuate their gold bars and their concubines, the end is at hand.” That so obvious and sad a collapse of a regime was taking place was one thing; what made the political situation back in America much more dangerous and explosive was all the extremely influential people who for a variety of political reasons and loyalties refused to tell the truth when they were back in America, or who tempered their reporting to make it seem that America had failed Chiang, rather than that Chiang had failed himself, his people, and his ally. What infuriated John Melby and many of the people trying to report honestly on the fall of Chiang was the duplicity of various American figures, who spoke one way about Chiang and why he was failing when they were in China; then, on return to the United States, feeling the domestic pro-Chiang political pressure, switched their line, refused to find fault with him, and became powerful voices for the China Lobby, placing all blame for his failures on the administration and the State Department’s China Hands, who had been warning of Chiang’s flaws and a future Communist victory. It was as if there was one truth that you told in China, when you were surrounded by other Americans and Chinese who knew how pathetically Chiang’s forces had fought, and another you told back in the States, surrounded by conservative friends who wanted their truths reinforced.

  The symbol of it, in Melby’s view, was the performance of General Albert Wedemeyer. In the summer of 1947, George Marshall, delighted to be out of China, had sent Wedemeyer, an old friend of Chiang’s, on a fact-finding mission. Generally considered an exceptionally able staff officer, Wedemeyer was a fierce anti-Communist, so it was a calculated risk on Marshall’s part, reflecting his belief that Wedemeyer’s ideology would be subordinated to his sense of reality. The Wedemeyer trip also represented a shrewd hope on Marshall’s part that the reactions of someone as conservative and pro-Chiang as Wedemeyer, after confronting the terrible reality on the ground in China, might help lessen right-wing pressure on the administration. In fact, the Wedemeyer visit did work in the short run, but in the long run it backfired. Within a few days of his arrival, Wedemeyer cabled Marshall that the Nationalists were “spiritually insolvent.” The people had lost confidence in their leadership. By contrast, he noted, the Communists had “excellent spirit, almost a fanatical fervor.” The government, he decided, was “corrupt, reactionary, and inefficient.” Later, asked what had gone wrong with Chiang’s cause, Wedemeyer said, “Lack of spirit, primarily lack of spirit. It was not lack of equipment. In my opinion they could have defended the Yangtze with broomsticks if they had the will to do it.”

  On August 22, 1947, just before Wedemeyer’s return home, he was scheduled to speak to a meeting of Nationalist ministers. He had been told by his old friend Chiang to be blunt, but the Gimo, playing a dual game, as he often did, had promptly called John Leighton Stuart, the American ambassador, and suggested Wedemeyer should speak carefully and not be too critical of the Chinese Army. Stuart, however, told Wedemeyer that time was running out and there should be no more niceties. As such, Wedemeyer was brutally blunt. The government, he said, had little support among the people; its failures had allowed the Communists to succeed; it was spiritually bankrupt. It was a devastating moment. One top Chinese official openly wept. The next night a farewell dinner had been scheduled at Stuart’s residence. But at the last minute, the Gimo canceled, claiming illness. Missimo, however, would come. Wedemeyer did not need that, so he canceled the dinner.

  But soon, back in America, the dedicated anti-Communist Wedemeyer reappeared, pushing the China Lobby line that Chiang had been brought down by a lack of aid and by treachery within the American mission. In December 1947, he went before the Senate Appropriations Committee, where the chairman, Styles Bridges, himself an important player in the China Lobby, asked him about Chiang. The Gimo was, Wedemeyer said, “a fine character, and you gentlemen on this committee would admire him and respect him.” Was it urgent, Bridges pressed, to send more military supplies to him? Wedemeyer, who while in China had recommended no further commitment of aid, answered in the affirmative. And did Wedemeyer think the United States had kept its promises to Chiang over the years? “No sir, I do not.” The reality and politics of China were clearly different from the reality and politics of Washington.

  The end in China came surprisingly quickly. On November 5, 1948, three days after Harry Truman’s surprise victory in the presidential election, the embassy in Nanjing advised all Americans in China to leave. At virtually the same time, Mao was warned by Anastas Mikoyan, special envoy from the ever cautious Joseph Stalin, not to let his armies cross the Yangtze River into southern China too hastily, lest it provoke the Americans to enter the Chinese civil war. On January 21, 1949, Chiang turned over nominal control of the Nationalist government to proxies and moved with his gold reserves to Taiwan, making himself into, as a State Department bulletin put it, “a refugee on a small island off the coast of China,” having thrown away “greater military power than any ruler had ever had in the history of China.” On April 21, 1949, Mao’s forces crossed the Yangtze River. Three days later, they took Nanjing, the Nationalist capital. The end was now in sight.

  Truman, Acheson, and Marshall had been aware since 1947 of what they wanted in China, a systematic disengagement, with as little participation in the ongoing civil war as possible, and of course with as little domestic political blowback as possible. Like the fall of the tsarist regime during World War I, Chiang’s collapse was driven by powerful historic forces far beyond the influence of American policy: a country that was already rotting and barely held together, crushed by the additional weight of a cataclysmic world war. There was, however, a significant difference between the collapse of tsarist Russia and that of Nationalist China. There had never been a powerful Russian lobby in America to mobilize American opinion in the years after the collapse of the Romanov family. The Russian Orthodox Church, to the extent that it existed in the United States, was not connected personally to ordinary Americans as the churches of Protestant and Catholic missionaries to China were. Russia had never been considered America’s, and thus could not be lost by America, whereas China was America’s, and thus had been lost by America.

  And so the fall of Chiang left a gaping opening in the American political fabric. On the domestic political front no one was interested in talking about the tragic inevitability of it. What the administration wanted was some time so that Truman might one day be able to deal with the new Chinese leaders and see if they could be at least partially separated from Moscow. Out of that might have come a new policy that could eventually have ended with the recognition of Mao’s China, something, it was then mistakenly believed, that Mao and the others in his government badly wanted. It was not to be.

  17

  THE COLLAPSE OF Chiang’s China quickly became a defining American political issue. Normally the failure of a regime like that would have made only a modest blip in American politics. But this was a different time. After Chiang finally fell in 1949, much was written about how the United States had betrayed him. The reporting on the coming collapse had been spotty and at least partially politicized: Chiang had powerful allies in American journalism, like Harry Luce, and Roy Howard of the Scripps Howard chain, who had effectively censored the news filed by their correspondents.

  The issue was perfect for the Republicans. Chiang’s failure was an obvious manifestation of the issue of subversion that they had decided to use after Dewey’s defeat. The fact that Chiang ended up on Taiwan made it an issue that would never go away. Ironically, those who had correctly warned that Chiang was not going to make i
t found themselves on the defensive, accused of undercutting him because they were leftists. The State Department’s China Hands were quickly scattered and hidden away in places as distant as possible, lest their careers be damaged even more for having reported accurately. The one important military man who might have made the case of Chiang’s failures, Joe Stilwell, had died in October 1946. The administration found itself in a particularly difficult bind: its Republican critics were shrewdly connecting Chiang to the issue that was paramount for Truman and Acheson, collective security in Europe. Truman and Acheson would not be able to get what they wanted for the Marshall Plan to rebuild a shattered Western Europe unless they compromised on China, their policies in Europe effectively held hostage to the approval of their enemies on China.

  The administration was very quickly losing the propaganda battle, and so the political battle as well. When, in 1949, Acheson authorized the State Department to put together and make public a China White Paper, a definitive documentary history of how Chiang had failed despite vast amounts of American aid, it proved to be a failure on both sides of the Pacific. In the United States, it was regarded as one last kick administered to a faltering regime, and enraged the China Lobby; in China, Mao seized on it as incontestable evidence—produced by the Americans themselves—that America had constantly worked against his China. It was proof positive the Americans were the enemies of China.

  So the administration had played the game out, going through the motions of aiding Chiang, knowing nothing good could possibly come of it, only in order not to have U.S. fingerprints on the eventual collapse that the Americans were certain was coming. That was true not just of the Democrats, but of some of the Republicans as well. In 1948, when Bourke Hickenlooper, a conservative Iowa senator, went to Arthur Vandenberg, his political leader, to ask him if a $570 million China aid bill would really do any good, Vandenberg answered, as Thomas Christensen has written, “At least the China collapse would not be placed on the shoulders of the American government.” What was important, Vandenberg said, was popular opinion, which greatly favored aid even to a dying China—“We are undertaking to resist Communist aggression, and we are ignoring one area completely and letting it completely disintegrate without even a gesture of assistance.”

  THE END CAME, but the end was not the end, for political reasons. The United States could not disengage as it wanted to, because Chiang’s political constituency in America had become far too powerful. Without either side understanding it, the United States and Mao’s China had already begun moving almost inexorably toward a military collision.

  If the administration was being attacked back home for doing too little, then in Beijing, in the new China, it was being denounced for having given too much to help save Chiang. In the eyes of Mao and his colleagues, America’s acts were not innocent. In their view, U.S. fingerprints had been everywhere on the civil war. The Americans had financed Chiang from 1941 to 1949. U.S. planes and naval transports had ferried his troops to the northern reaches of China in 1945 to take the Japanese surrender. Neutral observers did not do that. In American minds, it was a small bit of help, the minimal the United States could really do—but to Mao and his top people it was egregious interference in their country and in their war. To them, America had acted exactly the way a rich capitalist nation was expected to act.

  Out of all of this had come an emboldened new force in American politics, the China Lobby. It was a loose alliance of people brought together for very different reasons. It connected powerful, shrewd, and extremely wealthy members of Chiang’s own family, often working in Washington or there on special assignment, to influential conservative American political and journalistic allies and friends. It was at once amorphous, and yet all too real, and highly focused. It was influential, for a variety of reasons, far beyond its numbers. It became in its time the most powerful lobby that had ever operated for a foreign power in Washington. What it wanted initially was fairly simple: massive aid to Chiang for as long as possible. In the late 1940s, in the ever more likely event that the Communists won, it wanted the United States to continue to view Chiang’s regime as China, and to block any recognition on Washington’s part of Mao’s regime; it wanted to keep the new China out of the UN; and finally it wanted to sustain aid to Chiang on Taiwan. What this lobby wanted, now that Chiang had lost the war, was for the United States to act as if he had actually won the war. What they really hoped for someday was an unlikely cataclysm that might send Chiang’s forces triumphantly back to the mainland under an American banner; something, say, like a war between the United States and China.

  The people in the China Lobby came together in some cases because of a genuine love of China as it once had been—at least in their imaginations—and a belief that somehow Chiang for all his myriad faults was its only possible leader if it was challenged by the Communists. In other cases, the reasons for supporting the Generalissimo were ignoble and hopelessly selfish, sometimes little more than the fact that working for the Chinese Nationalists often paid so well. For a good many people, seizing on the issue was a chance to get even after a prolonged period of Democratic Party hegemony. Some, like Congressman Walter Judd, who had been a medical missionary as a young man, or like Henry Luce, the son of a missionary, were not merely China Firsters, but Chiang Firsters, men who believed as an article of faith that the one great truth of this struggle was that Chiang and China were one and the same. Many of them had no love for the Europe First policies that had dominated American foreign policy for so long and were looking to shift America’s essential anti-Communist focus to the Pacific, where they felt our future lay.

  For the China Firsters who had grown up in China as the children of missionaries, that country’s pull was deep and unrelenting; China was in some ways as much their home and their native country as the United States was. In addition, to say that Chiang had failed was to say that their own parents, who had devoted their lives to bringing Christianity to China, had been failures (as indeed, in at least the narrow sense of their mission, they had failed). In the fall of 1946, on one of his trips to China, Luce had been engaged by John Melby, who suggested that his singular commitment to Chiang rather than to China was a mistake. Luce immediately rejected Melby’s suggestion with an exceptionally revealing answer. “You’ve got to remember,” he answered, “that we were born here. This is all we’ve ever known. We had made a lifetime commitment to the advancement of Christianity in China. And now you’re attacking us for it. You’re asking us to say that all our lives have been wasted; they’ve been futile. They’ve been lived for nothing. That’s a pretty tough thing to ask of anyone isn’t it?” It was, Melby agreed, but it had to be done because the world and China had changed, because the China they knew was dying.

  But it was that kind of passion—and nostalgia—that fueled no small amount of the success of the China Lobby. Much of the political activity was initially directed out of the Chinese embassy in Washington and, for a time near the end in 1948, when Madame Chiang came to this country for an extended stay, from her brother-in-law’s home in Riverdale, New York. Chiang’s two brothers-in-law, T. V. Soong and H. H. Kung (as well as Wellington Koo, the ambassador in Washington), were very good at the game they were playing. T. V. Soong had once warned John Paton Davies, a talented foreign service officer, and one of the ablest of the China Hands, that there was no State Department memo sent from China that he did not have access to within two or three days. These top Nationalists sometimes seemed to understand how Washington worked better than their American counterparts did, and they had allies throughout the government, a number of powerful Republican senators and even a few renegade Democrats, like Pat McCarran of Nevada. Certainly, though, their greatest ally, the most important man to the lobby, the one who brought a group of people who otherwise might be considered on the fringe of politics and gave them and their cause far greater legitimacy, was not a politician at all, but the most important publisher of the era, Henry Luce.

  No one wa
s more critical to the pro-Chiang alliance than Luce—he gave it a national voice perceived as coming from the political center rather than the far right, and he worked hard to suppress any views contrary to his own. Since he was the most partisan of men, and a passionate Republican—“my second church” he called the party—liberal Democrats were always going to be on the defensive in his universe. Some of the other China Firsters had little political respectability, but Luce could manage to change the political balance and to cast doubts on centrists whose more realistic views on what was happening in China he abhorred. Few of the others in the China Lobby were his normal political allies; more often than not they were isolationists, and he was quite possibly the leading Republican internationalist of that time, and thus their sworn enemy at the Republican conventions of 1940, 1944, 1948, and in time, 1952. But he went after anyone who might oppose him on China with ferocity, crushing without hesitation whomever got in his way. He savaged careers—political, diplomatic, and journalistic—without much anguish, or worry about normal moral or journalistic ethics. Those who suffered because of what his magazines wrote deserved their fate, he believed, for straying from his truth, disagreeing with him, or getting in his way.

  He was the son of missionary parents in China, brilliant, unusually awkward socially, with a great raw intelligence and a restless natural curiosity. At Hotchkiss, his prep school, and then at Yale, he had been a poor boy, out of step with everyone, always a bit too eager, his parents not connected to the parents of his elite classmates. He always wore the wrong clothes, outdated American styles from a very distant era, copied faithfully in heavy fabric by Chinese tailors. “Chink Luce” was his nickname, a most unwanted one. He once told the novelist Pearl Buck how he had hated prep school and college, because he had felt so different and so poor. As a publisher ever more successful, he became steadily more sure of his truths, chief among them his vision of what America could and should be in the twentieth century, the inventor as it were of the rather heady concept of the American Century. He was an odd mixture of parts that did not seem to mesh perfectly: the Calvinist as journalist; and yet when it came to those who opposed his ideas, he was more like a brutal Chinese warlord who took no prisoners. Early in his journalistic career he had not seemed that interested in rekindling his China connection; it had been very painful and he was busy shedding it, becoming more American than the native sons he had failed to charm at school. But in 1932, at the age of thirty-four, already a stunning success as an editor and publisher, he visited China and the connection was renewed. The Soong family, the wealthiest in China (and perhaps soon the world, because of American aid), played to him skillfully; they were far more adroit in manipulating powerful Westerners, saying all the right things and getting what they wanted, than Westerners were in playing them. He decided in those fateful days that all of China might become a nation of people just like this remarkable family: sophisticated, Christian, capitalist, and seemingly grateful—and that the task of bringing China to this wondrous new incarnation and away from its cruel, heathen past was now nothing less than the mission of America in the American Century. He had left China after that visit with his greatest cause.