The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  The State Department knew the crunch was coming; in August 1949 it published its White Paper on China, a document designed to show that the fall of China was the fault of Chiang and that the United States had gone as far as an ally could go. What is remarkable about the White Paper in retrospect is the intelligence and quality of the reporting. It was written by very bright young men putting their assessments on the line; in that sense it would be a high-water mark for the Department. From then on young foreign service officers would learn their lessons and hedge their bets, and muddle their reporting.

  The first assault on the Department came early in 1950, and it came in the Republican Saturday Evening Post in a series of articles which provided that material for the ensuing Republican attacks upon the Department and the Democrats. Rather than trying to hold the line for sane and thoughtful assessments, an important organ like the Post was looking for conspiratorial answers, and it had exactly the right author, former Captain Joseph Alsop, now back in America, bitter over our failure to support Chiang and the full Chiang line, anxious to get even. The title of the three-part series was “Why We Lost China,” and it was not a serious bit of journalism, a view of a decaying feudal society, but rather a re-creation of the Chennault-Chiang line. It set the tone, though slightly loftier than some successors, for the conspiracy view of the fall of China: the blame was placed on the State Department. The title is worth remembering: “Why We Lost China.” China was ours, and it was something to lose; it was an assumption which was to haunt foreign policy makers for years to come. Countries were ours, we could lose them; a President was faced with the blackmail of losing a country.

  In those days the Post was a powerful and respectable if somewhat conservative magazine; the Alsop articles were on the borderline of respectability. They were not particularly thoughtful or deep, for that is not his style, and they did not charge conspiracy; they only implied it, as is also his style (“The origin of this venture must be traced as far back as the 1930s when General Stilwell was military attaché to China and his political adviser John Davies, was vice-consul there. Among Whittaker Chambers’ celebrated pumpkin papers is a Stilwell intelligence report of this period, revealing that even in the 30s he was already strongly prejudiced against the Chinese Nationalists and in favor of the Chinese Communists. Davies’ viewpoint was approximately similar. Essentially Stilwell and Davies were victims of the then fashionable liberalism which idyllically pictured the Communists as 'democratic agrarian reformers’ . . .”). The Alsop articles emphasized the conspiratorial nature of events; they did not really raise the issue of treason, and they were all right if no one went further.

  Someone else would go further. The Alsop articles began the process of legitimizing the issue: twenty years later, both Davies and Service could single out the articles as a key to the turning point; the Post articles took the issue from the radical fringe and gave it a respectability where it would be adopted by a Republican party badly in need of issues. It would be valuable to the Republicans, but it would also be material for McCarthyism, and one of the darker chapters of this American century. McCarthy would exploit the charges to such an extent that even Alsop would be appalled. It was one thing to get even with a few of the younger and more foolish boys in the State Department, but it was another when McCarthy went after old and trusted friends like Dean—Dean Acheson. There was a memorable moment in Wisconsin when McCarthy had been making his charges, reckless as usual, against the top boys, and Alsop, a member of the press corps, stood up and angrily challenged him, shouting that this simply was not true; Alsop could vouch for men like Acheson, he knew them personally. Yet as the pressures against the China officers grew, Alsop became outraged and behaved well, testifying in their behalf and working to get lawyers for them, though not behaving so well that he was not unwilling to try some of the same tactics twenty years later when Vietnam arose as an issue, telling people in Washington that dovish reporters were traitors (and of course letting people know that he had behaved well, telling a reporter years later on the subject of Owen Lattimore, a distinguished Sinologist who had been particularly abused in those years: “Lattimore was a perfect fool, of course. It’s awful to have to defend fools and knaves, but sometimes you do have to . . . And there is a difference between foolishness and treason”). Years later he would sit in Saigon bars and tell reporters there that they were fools, that they would be investigated by congressional committees for their mistakes, but that he would testify in their behalf.

  Not everybody made the distinction between foolishness and treason. It was not a particularly propitious time for distinctions, even those as unsubtle as this. For it was 1950 now. We had lost China, the Republicans were hungry, the Democrats were clearly on the defensive. Had they been too soft on the Communists? Too muddled? They would rally now. To make sure that they did, to take the last measure of flexibility out of an increasingly inflexible foreign policy, there was the coming of Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin. Tail gunner Joe. The accidental demagogue. How quickly he came and how quickly he disappeared, and how much he left behind. He had been elected to the Senate in 1946, beating a too liberal and too confident Bob La Follette in the Republican primary, capitalizing on and vastly exaggerating his own war record in the election. “He and millions of other guys kept you from talking Japanese . . . Congress needs a tail gunner . . . America needs Fighting Men . . . These Men who fought upon foreign soil to Save America have earned the right to Serve America in times of peace . . .” He had gone on to win the general election; he was a good candidate, forceful, physical, he was part Populist in a state where Populist roots went deep. There was a sense of shrewdness to him, a sense of the jugular on an issue, yet also a lack of seriousness, and an attention span of marked limitations. But the physical energy was there, it was part of him. There was a certain pathos too. Though he was playing this role, Joe the rugged fighter against all those sinister forces and effete Easterners, there was a feeling that more than anything he wanted to be accepted as one of the boys, to be good old Joe, to be the outsider welcomed in.

  Four years after he was elected he was looking for an issue; he could not, after all, keep running against the Japanese. In January 1950 he found it. On January 7 he had dinner with some friends, all Catholics: William Roberts, an ex-Marine and a liberal adviser of Drew Pearson; Professor Charles Kraus, a political science instructor at Georgetown, also an ex-Marine; and Father Edmund Walsh, vice-president of Georgetown, regent of its very conservative school of foreign service, a man who had been at war with Communism for three decades and had just written a book on the Communists entitled Total Power. At the dinner in the Colony Restaurant, McCarthy outlined his problem; he needed an issue that would catch attention and excite the voters. What about the St. Lawrence Seaway, Roberts suggested. No sex appeal, said McCarthy. Then McCarthy talked about a national pension plan, $100 a month to everyone over sixty-five. Too utopian, the others argued (the mind boggles for a moment; suppose he had gone to pension plans instead of Communists. Would history have been different?). After dinner they moved from the restaurant to Roberts’ office. Father Walsh began to talk about his favorite subject, Communism. It was, he said, a major issue, and it would be increasingly important. As Walsh spoke, McCarthy picked him up on it. It sounded right; he had done a little of it himself once or twice, and the feedback had always been good. As McCarthy thought about it, he became excited; it was a real issue, and it could be used. The government, he said, was full of Communists: “The thing to do is hammer away at them.” Some of the others warned him that he would have to be careful; he would have to do his homework and be very accurate (later they would all disown him). But it was too late, McCarthy was already on his way.

  On February 9, 1950, McCarthy flew into Wheeling, West Virginia, where he made the first of his major Red-baiting Communist-conspiracy charges: “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist party a
nd members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department . . .” His timing could not have been better; in four months the Korean War began, and because the China experts were already in disrepute, the State Department did not heed their warnings on what American moves might bring the Chinese into the war. The warnings unheeded, the Chinese entered, and the anti-Communist passions against the China experts mounted. It was a Greek thing.

  It had really begun. The issues were drawn, false issues; the real issues were postwar fear and uncertainty. Around the country he flew, reckless and audacious, stopping long enough to make a new charge, to exhibit a new list, a good newsworthy press conference at the airport, hail-fellow well met with the reporters, and then on to the next stop, the emptiness of the charge never catching up with him, the American press exploited in its false sense of objectivity (if a high official said something, then it was news, if not fact, and the role of the reporter was to print it straight without commenting, without assaulting the credibility of the incredulous; that was objectivity). It was like a circus; he was always on the move, his figures varied, his work was erratic and sloppy, he seemed to have no genuine interest in any true nature of security. It sometimes seemed as if he too were surprised by the whole thing, how easy it was, how little resistance he met, and so he hurtled forward to newer, larger charges. But if they did not actually stick, and they did not, his charges had an equally damaging effect: they poisoned. Where there was smoke, there must be fire. He wouldn’t be saying those things unless there was something to it. And so the contamination remained after the facts, or lack of them, evaporated; long after the specifics had faded into obscurity, the stain remained. Not just of lowly people, but of Acheson, and even Marshall. Even the figure of the stature of Marshall, the most distinguished soldier-servant of an entire era, was stained by it. So was the Democratic party, and the State Department. He knew no bounds—he was attacking the very government officials who thought that they themselves would determine the scope and limits of anti-Communism.

  All of which did not displease the Republican party. The real strength of McCarthy was not his own force or brilliance, it was the acquiescence of those who should have known better. Very few performed well in that period. The press was willingly exploited by him; very few stood and fought (even the much-heralded Edward R. Murrow documentary of McCarthy was shown in March 1954 after McCarthy had attacked the Army, four years after the Wheeling speech). It was as if the press too felt guilty, haunted by its past. The Democratic party did not combat McCarthy or the bases of his charges. A few individuals did, but the congressional leadership did not confront him. It decided to let him spend himself, run his course. When he had gone too far, then they would turn on him, which they did—by going too far they meant of course that he had begun to attack the Republicans themselves. So the Democratic party, victim of his charges, did not fight as an institution, nor use its real force, but the Republicans were worse. They welcomed him; the more he assaulted the Democrats, the better for them; the Democrats were on the defensive, and the Republicans were the beneficiaries. He was, in the words of one observer, “like a pig in a minefield for them.” “Joe,” said John Bricker, one of the more traditional Republican conservatives, a candidate for Vice-President in 1944, “you’re a real SOB. But sometimes it’s useful to have SOBs around to do the dirty work.”

  Bricker was not the only one to acquiesce; the awesome Robert Taft, Mr. Integrity, also played the game, and made this the darkest chapter of his career. He would tell McCarthy that if one case did not pan out, he should drop it and try another (part of Taft’s odd relationship with McCarthy was personal; McCarthy had done a particularly shrewd job of playing up to Taft’s invalid wife, visiting her regularly and ingratiating himself greatly). A young and ambitious senator from California named Richard Nixon would play the role of bridge between McCarthy and the more respectable center of the Republican party. Taft, though, was the fallen idol of that period; in his eagerness to get at the Democrats he had been a willing party to the most reckless kind of political charges, against men whose loyalty was unassailable. Had he stood and confronted the recklessness of McCarthy’s charges, the Republican party would have stood with him. Of him the epitaph for this chapter in his life was that he knew better but the temptation was too great.

  What rises must converge; what goes up quickly comes down even more quickly. Eisenhower allowed McCarthy to destroy himself. By 1954 McCarthy was finished, he had gone too far, he had long since been repudiated by his early advisers from that Colony dinner, he had shed himself of advisers who urged restraint. He was censured by the Senate, he began to drink heavily; by 1957 he was dead; but the fears he left behind would live long after him. He had contributed a word to the language, “McCarthyism”; and he had, by his presence and by the fears that he had found in the country and exploited, helped damage two major organs of government, the State Department and the Democratic party. He had also made the foreign policy of the United States even more rigid, both then and later. The country would in particular pay the price for this in Vietnam. The legacy of it all was poison.

  The confluence and the mixing of these three events, the fall of China, the rise of McCarthy and the outbreak of the Korean War, would have a profound effect on American domestic politics, and consequently an equally significant effect on foreign policy. The Democratic Administration was on the defensive; a country could not be lost without serious political consequences; each new Administration became increasingly susceptible to blackmail from any small oligarchy which proclaimed itself anti-Communist. The anti-Communist rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine had come rather easily in 1947, now even more; succeeding U.S. governments would find themselves prisoners of that rhetoric. There would be, and this was a subtle thing, a disposition to see the world somewhat differently, and this was particularly true in Indochina. There was now less of a disposition to see the French war as a colonial war, more of a disposition to see it as a Western war against the Communists, a war which sought to bestow freedom upon Vietnam. Bao Dai, the emperor the Japanese had installed in 1940, became a respectable figure in late 1949. The element of nationalism which Ho Chi Minh held began to diminish in State Department accounts, and with the coming of the Korean War, in journalistic accounts as well. There was an even greater disposition to see Communism as a universal force; the war in Korea and the war in Indochina were linked as one (Eisenhower said in his inaugural in January 1953 that the French soldier in Indochina and the American soldier in Korea were fighting the same thing). Similarly Acheson, testifying at the MacArthur hearings, and wanting to hold off Republican criticism against our allies, would make this same point. By prior arrangement Senator Lyndon Johnson asked: “Mr. Secretary, some Republicans are attacking our allies for not helping us in the Korean War. Mr. Secretary, can you comment here where our allies are helping us elsewhere? I mean Indochina.”

  “That’s an excellent point,” Acheson answered. “The French have been fighting that battle since World War II.” This was a reverse of his earlier position, which was that it was a stupid colonial war but there was no alternative to it. Thus the policies of the 1950s in Asia were poisoned.

  Chapter Eight

  The essence of good foreign policy is constant re-examination. The world changes, and both domestic perceptions of the world and domestic perceptions of national political possibilities change. It was one thing to base a policy in Southeast Asia on total anti-Communism in the early 1950s when the Korean War was being fought and when the French Indochina war was still at its height, when there was, on the surface at least, some evidence of a Communist monolith, and when the United States at home was becoming locked into the harshest of the McCarthy tensions. But it was another thing to accept these policies quite so casually in 1961 (although McCarthy was gone and the atmosphere in w
hich the policies had been set had changed, the policies remained much the same), when both the world and the United States were very different. By 1961 the schism in the Communist world was clearly apparent: Khrushchev had removed his technicians and engineers from China.

  It was seven years since the United States Senate had censured McCarthy. Not only was he gone but many of his colleagues of that era, Kem, Knowland, Jenner, McCarran—his fellow travelers all—were gone too, and the new Republicans who entered the Senate in the late fifties and early sixties would tend to be far more moderate and modern men. But the Kennedy Administration did not re-evaluate any of the Eisenhower conceptions in Asia (conceptions which Dulles had tailored carefully to the disposition of the McCarthy group in the Senate); if anything, the Kennedy people would set out to upgrade and modernize the means of carrying out those policies. Later, as their policies floundered in Vietnam, they would lash out in frustration at their own personnel there, at the reporters, at the incompetence of the client government. What they did not realize was that the problem was not just American personnel, which was often incompetent, nor the governmental reporting, which was highly dishonest, nor the client government, which was just as bad as its worst critics claimed—the real problem was the failure to re-examine the assumptions of the era, particularly in Southeast Asia. There was no real attempt, when the new Administration came in, to analyze Ho Chi Minh’s position in terms of the Vietnamese people and in terms of the larger Communist world, to establish what Diem represented, to determine whether the domino theory was in fact valid. Each time the question of the domino theory was sent to intelligence experts for evaluation, they would send back answers which reflected their doubts about its validity, but the highest level of government left the domino theory alone. It was as if, by questioning it, they might have revealed its emptiness, and would then have been forced to act on their new discovery. In fact, the President’s own public statements on Laos and on Vietnam, right through to the time of the assassination, reflected if not his endorsement of the domino theory, then his belief that he could not yet challenge it, and by his failure to challenge it, the necessity to go along with it.