The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (33 page)

The civilians knew that there was always going to be a next incident with MacArthur. In this case they didn’t have to wait very long. It took fewer than three weeks. This time it was a VFW speech. The general had been asked to speak, or at least send a speech along to be read, to the annual meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, like the American Legion not a constituency of the dovish. Again the speech was about Taiwan. Its military value was not to be underestimated, he said. From Taiwan the United States “can dominate with air power every Asiatic port from Vladivostok to Singapore and prevent any hostile movement into the Pacific.” It was in an odd way as if he were carrying ammunition for the nation’s adversaries by going so public on so delicate a subject. This—that Taiwan was a great military base for the Americans—was exactly the point the Russians, both for themselves and on behalf of the Chinese, were
trying to make in the United Nations, and the point that Washington wanted to minimize in order to limit the scope of the Korean War. Then MacArthur went even further—he tweaked the administration one more time—speaking, it seemed, not so much as its most important commanding general in the field, but as one of its leading political critics at home. “Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia…. Those who speak thus do not understand the Orient. They do not grant that it is in the pattern of Oriental psychology to respect and follow aggressive, resolute and dynamic leadership.” If it was not an assault on Truman himself, it was most obviously an all-out slap at Acheson.

Truman was once again furious. Though the speech was already public, and had been moved by the wire service, it had not yet been read to the VFW convention. Truman called in his top people and told Louis Johnson, who agreed with MacArthur on the subject, to tell MacArthur to withdraw the speech—and that it was a presidential order. “Do you understand that?” the president asked. “Yes, sir, I do,” Johnson answered. “Go and do it, that’s all,” said the president (angry at Johnson as well, feeling that he was something of a co-conspirator in all this). But Johnson went back to his office and wavered, not liking the idea of telling MacArthur to eat his own speech. He called Acheson and suggested ways of softening Truman’s orders—as if what MacArthur had said was simply one man’s opinion and every man was entitled to his opinion. Acheson reminded him that it was an order from Truman. All day long phone calls went back and forth among the various principals, except for Truman. Finally in mid-afternoon, Truman telephoned Johnson and dictated the message to MacArthur: “The President of the United States directs that you withdraw your message for the National Encampment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, because various features with respect to Formosa are in conflict with the policy of the U.S. and its position in the U.N.” Finally it was withdrawn—now making MacArthur the angry one. But just as the speech had been made public and then withdrawn, the incident was over, but not over. Later, after MacArthur and Truman had their final clash and the president relieved him, Truman would sometimes mutter that he should have done it so much earlier, back at the time of the VFW speech.

It was the death knell for Louis Johnson, who was ordered by the president to resign some two weeks later. Johnson broke down in tears when Truman repeatedly told him to sign his farewell letter. Johnson was, wrote Truman’s biographer, David McCullough, “possibly the worst appointment Truman ever made.” “Nutty as a fruitcake,” Acheson said of him. He had managed during his brief tour in office to offend almost everyone in the administration, including
the president, the secretary of state, most cabinet members, and almost every senior military official whose path he crossed. The senior military men, often squabbling bitterly with one another over postwar roles, were united by a single common feeling in that time—they all hated Louis Johnson. He seemed to them a crude caricature of their worst nightmares of a civilian politician. He regularly denigrated their skills and the need for what they did. With the atomic bomb in mind, he wrote to one senior admiral in December 1949 (using what the writer Robert Heinl called his “characteristic tact”): “Admiral, the Navy is on its way out…. There’s no reason for having a Navy or Marine Corps. General Bradley tells me amphibious landings are a thing of the past. We’ll never have any more amphibious landings. That does away with the Marine Corps. And the Air Force can do anything the Navy can nowadays, so that does away with the Navy.” He was hated in senior Army circles because of the pressures he kept applying to make a vastly diminished Army even smaller. By the time he was fired in September 1950, three months into the Korean War, a mordant joke was circulating in the Pentagon: the Joint Chiefs, it went, had informed Johnson that he could finally call off his relentless troop reduction demands—enough men were being killed in Korea every day to bring the Army’s strength down to the desired level. He was despised by almost everyone who had to deal with him. “Unwittingly, Truman had replaced one mental case with another,” Omar Bradley later wrote in his memoirs, in a reference to Forrestal.

But the fact that it had expedited Johnson’s departure, almost guaranteed before the year was out anyway, was the least important part of the VFW-MacArthur contretemps. It had exacerbated the relationship between the president and the general, who had been forced to back down and respect a presidential order, a process that was as unpleasant as it was alien to him, and it was bound to fester. It was also a clear warning to the White House, like the visit to Taiwan, that MacArthur was a dissident, both hierarchically and politically. It showed that he was by no means in agreement with their policies in Asia, including potentially the aims in the war they were fighting, and that he was more than likely to be a serious opponent on an issue that had come to haunt them, that of China. That was no small fault line: the president and his secretary of state wanted, if at all possible, to separate Korea from the larger issue of China, and the general, if he did not actually want to connect the two—and there is considerable evidence that he did, much of it from things he said, that he got down on his knees and prayed every night that China would enter the war—certainly was in no way bothered by the prospect of a Chinese entry.

To replace Johnson, Truman reached out for George Marshall, exhausted by his previous tours of duty, whose health was somewhat shaky, and who was just a few months short of his seventieth birthday. Marshall had been hoping
to slip into a semi-gentrified retirement as head of the Red Cross. Truman, sensing Johnson’s fate, had already sent out a recon mission to see if Marshall might be willing to serve again. Marshall said he would serve, but only for six months, with Bob Lovett, a much respected figure in the national security world, coming in as his number two and then replacing him. Are you sure you really want me? Marshall had asked the president. The president might want to ponder, he said, “the fact that my appointment may reflect upon you and your Administration. They are still charging me with the downfall of Chiang’s government in China. I want to help, not hurt you.” Later, noting the conversation in a letter to his wife, Truman had written, “Can you think of anyone else saying that? I can’t and he’s one of the
great
?”

Even as the Korean War began, the death of one China and the birth of another hung over the administration—it was the issue from which the administration was beginning to hemorrhage. If in 1948 the Republicans had been in search of an issue, in 1949 their prayers were answered. The collapse of Chiang’s regime would prove the first important step in what would eventually become a terrible collision between the United States and China on the battlefield itself a mere twenty months later. On November 3, 1948, the day before the presidential election, Chinese Nationalist forces retreated from Shenyang, the largest city in Manchuria, abandoning for the first time a major city (and control of much of the surrounding area) to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communists. The rout was on. Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were in the process of a stunning collapse, each new defeat seeming to ensure that the next one would be bigger and come even more quickly. Sometimes entire Nationalist divisions surrendered and immediately became part of Mao’s new army. Other divisions simply disappeared, leaving behind for their Communist enemies millions of dollars worth of American military equipment.

From then on, the United States and a new revolutionary China, sometimes seemingly deaf and dumb to each other’s political and military impulses, would stumble in an awkward slow-motion dance toward an unwanted military collision. There had been plentiful signs of Chiang’s decline over the previous four years, but because of the propaganda put out by so many journalists favorable to the regime, the end of his rule had still come as shattering news to millions of Americans. Beloved China, a country they had been told during World War II was inhabited by industrious, obedient, trustworthy,
good
Asians (as Japan had only so recently been inhabited by wily, sneaky, untrustworthy,
bad
Asians), had suddenly gone Communist. First Russia, an ally during World War II, had turned out to be an enemy; now, perhaps even more shattering, China had become an enemy as well, an ally of the Soviet Union.

For millions of Americans it felt like a betrayal, and a sinister one at that,
because when China’s immense land mass and population were added to Russia’s enormous land mass and population, the world looked infinitely more dangerous. If both countries were colored pink on a giant geopolitical map of the world, which for political reasons they now often were, that map suddenly looked significantly more ominous. Because the emotions China generated among millions of Americans were greater than those generated by any comparable country, because the Democrats had won five elections in a row and the Republicans were looking for a new, hot issue, the political ramifications of the fall of China would prove staggering. The question now rising—an immensely partisan one—was: Who Lost China? Underlying it was the deeper assumption—and great historical misconception—that China had ever been ours; more, ours to lose. The fall of Chiang’s China, though few understood it—or wanted to understand it—at the time, was part of the price of a dramatic alteration of the world’s power structure that had taken place during six years of total war. World War II had been more than just the catastrophic struggle between two sides, the Allies and the Axis; like World War I, it would have far-reaching global consequences.

THE CHINA THAT
existed in the minds of millions of Americans was the most illusory of countries, filled as it was with dutiful, obedient peasants who liked America and loved Americans, who longed for nothing so much as to be like them. It was a country where ordinary peasants allegedly hoped to be more Christian and were eager, despite the considerable obstacles in their way, to rise out of what Americans considered a heathen past. Millions of Americans believed not only that they loved (and understood) China and the Chinese, but that it was their duty to Americanize the Chinese. “With God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up until it is just like Kansas City,” said Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, one of the Republicans who would become a particularly bitter critic of the administration for its China policies (and who once referred to French Indochina as Indigo-China).

Long before Chiang went to Taiwan, and established his rather personal China on location, there were two Chinas. There was China in the American public mind, a China as Americans wanted it to be, and the other China, the real China, which was coming apart and was the sad daily reality of those Americans on location. The illusory China was a heroic ally, ruled by the brave, industrious, Christian, pro-American Chiang Kai-shek and his beautiful wife, Mayling, a member of one of China’s wealthiest and best connected families, herself Christian and American-educated, and who seemed to have been ordered up directly from Central Casting for a major public relations campaign. The goals of the Generalissimo and his lady, it always seemed, were
exactly the same as America’s goals, their values the same as ours as well. The reality of course was completely different. In a way, what happened after World War II was the cruelest of jokes: the impact of all those thousands of American missionaries who had so dutifully and faithfully gone to China over a century would be greater on the politics of their own country than it was on China, the country they hoped to change, and whose culture and politics they barely dented. Millions and millions of American children, as John Melby, one of the more talented members of the American embassy in China’s wartime capital, Chongqing, later wrote, had faithfully brought their pennies to Sunday school to give to the poor and unwashed of China. Their parents had heard the missionaries, back on home leave, speak at their churches and evoke not just the marvels of China and the Chinese, but the vast challenge always still ahead for those who desired to do the Lord’s work.

The China that existed in reality was a feudal country badly fragmented politically and geographically, a country of almost unbearable poverty, ruled more often than not by regional warlords of exceptional cruelty. It was a country of some 500 million people governed, if that was even the word, by a shaky, corrupt national administration, predatory foreign interests, an infinite number of warlords, and a tiny, self-serving oligarchy that also doubled as the government. To the leadership in much of the West, seeking as it did constant commercial benefits, a weak, vulnerable China was the preferred one. As the civil war continued, it reflected a historic attempt on China’s part to redefine itself as a nation, one that would be truly whole, and perhaps even strong, and no longer, as it had been for so long, prey to powerful Western nations from afar and to warlords within. It had been torn apart by more than two decades of on-and-off civil war and by the brutality inflicted on its people during the Japanese occupation. It was a China burdened, now that World War II was over, with a sad, badly flawed leadership under Chiang, hardly equal to the Herculean challenges caused by such severe external and internal problems. It was, in historic terms, ripe for the picking.