America's Retreat from Victory - Joseph McCarthy |
So Marshall, having created the China policy with Acheson and Vincent at his side, and having executed it in China, was returned to the State Department where he could administer it in line with his will and desires.
I have often wondered what prompted President Truman to replace Byrnes, a man of politics, with a professional soldier—a soldier turned diplomat who had, moreover, just sold China out to the Communists—a fact which I suspect was, however, among the multitude of things that Truman did not know. He had much company in this. Our attention, among other things, was on Greece during the early weeks of 1947, and Marshall's prestige among the liberals who controlled the avenues of communication with the people was—largely because of his obedience to the Yenan Reds—towering by then.
Jonathan Daniels gives us a satisfactory clue in The Man of Independence, where, on page 316, he reflects:
"Truman had, when he appointed him and afterwards as well, more confidence in Marshall than in anybody in the Government and probably anybody in the world. Sometimes, indeed, he acted when some members of his staff thought that Marshall was being a little stuffy, as if Marshall were his walking equivalent of George Washington and Robert E. Lee."
I have some curiosity that goes deeper than the passage I have just quoted. Whence did that adoration spring? What hidden and undisclosed forces were at work around the President so to shape his emotions and his will that he would appoint Marshall Secretary of State?
Whatever dark forces lay behind Marshall's appointment to the head of our foreign relations, it did bring him into even closer contact with Dean Acheson. I have studied Acheson's public utterances, sidewise, slantwise, hindwise, and frontwise; I have watched the demeanor of this glib, supercilious, and guilty man on the witness stand; I have reflected upon his career, and I come to only one conclusion: his primary loyalty in international affairs seems to run to the British Labor Government, his secondary allegiance to the Kremlin, with none left for the country of his birth. The only trouble Acheson ever encounters is where Socialist-British and Russian-Communist policy diverge, which, in Asia at least, has been seldom. Then he reluctantly follows the lead from Socialist London. That was so in the matter of the Greek and Turkish aid policy to which we shall soon come.
Where, you may ask, does President Truman fit into this picture? I do not believe that the President's staunchest advocate will claim that he understands these questions. They are beyond the capacity he has demonstrated to the country both as to scope and detail. We have noted his idolatry of Marshall. We have observed the extravagant estimates he has placed on Acheson's qualities, his stubborn refusal to dismiss him. I think it is clear that, in these great matters of life and death, President Truman is in the custody of Marshall and Acheson.
The question of China was never absent from the forefront of American concern during the two years Marshall passed as Secretary of State. The matter of supplying the Republic of China frequently recurred. We had brushes with Russia over the open door in Manchuria. Twice during 1947, we are informed by the White Paper, this Government protested Russia's appropriation of Dairen, a port whose freedom was guaranteed in the treaty of August 1445 between Moscow and China. Each time the State Department was rebuffed and let the matter drop. The Russian pretext was that the treaty allowed Russia to close the port in time of war with Japan. Were we at war with Japan? Technically, yes. No peace treaty had ended that war, and Russia was a party to that war because of Marshall's exertions before and at Yalta. As you might suppose, the Secretary of State refused to get exercised over Russian effrontery and impudence in this matter.
There were a number of other situations affecting China which we shall consider in their proper place. Through his incumbency at the State Department, Marshall remained the sworn and implacable enemy of the Republic of China. Such enmity, of course, was in the interest of the Yenan Reds and their masters in Moscow.
Other major aspects of the struggle with Russia over the shape of the peacetime world intruded in the spring of 1947. Marshall had scarcely warmed his office chair before he went to Moscow for one of those fruitless, ill-natured conferences with the commissars through which we have expiated the original sin of recognizing the Bolshevik empire. This conference was to consider a peace treaty with Germany. Before he departed for Moscow on March 7, the Secretary of State ordered home the last of the United States Marines who had afforded some measure of stability to North China. This removed, as the American Communists had long been urging, the last visible assurance to the Chinese that American power was friendly to them. On April 2, in Moscow, Marshall was able to report to Molotov that the Marines were coming home "as rapidly as shipping becomes available." Did he tie this great concession to the Yenan Reds, to American leftist and liberal agitation and to Moscow, to anything we wanted from the Kremlin? Not that we know of.
The Council of Foreign Ministers at Moscow was a perfunctory exhibition of Russian intransigence. Nothing of any moment was accomplished. The plain-speaking Mark Clark was there on the problems of Austria, Lucius Clay on those of Germany. As Clark recalled the matter on page 486 of his book Calculated Risk:
"I felt that it must have taken a great deal of courage for Marshall to step into the job of Secretary of State and then leave almost immediately for Moscow to deal with many intricate problems before he had time to familiarize himself with the essential details.
"I was amazed, however, when we met in Berlin (on the way to Moscow) to discover that we didn't have a definite program of action. On the eve of the most importance conference since Potsdam everybody was still discussing what we should do in Moscow."
The atmosphere of Moscow should have been congenial to Marshall. On several occasions, as we have seen, Stalin had gone out of his way to make commendatory remarks about the American. At a dinner given by Molotov, Marshall wore his Order of Suvorov on his dinner jacket. He had a talk with Stalin. Usually, perhaps without exception, foreigners who have words with Stalin find some way to acquaint the public with the whole conversation between them and the Autocrat of all Russians. Not so with Marshall. He did say in a radio broadcast noting the conference's failure, that in this conversation, Stalin had called the conference negotiations "only the first skirmishes and brushes of reconnaissance forces on this question." The question was the kind of self-government Germany should have. This broadcast took place on April 28 upon Marshall's return to Washington. The obstacle to agreement on this issue, he said, was that "the Soviet government insisted upon proposals which would have established in Germany a centralized government adapted to the seizure of absolute control." He concluded, "the patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate."
It may be gathered that one subject of Marshall's private talk with Stalin was the Russian demand, first heard when Hopkins was in Moscow in the preceding June, for a reinstatement of some of the items of the fourth lend-lease protocol which was cancelled at the end of hostilities in Europe.
A few days after Marshall's return to Washington he conferred with the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Senator from New Hampshire, Styles Bridges, and with his opposite number from the other house, Mr. Taber.
Marshall came to see those gentlemen in behalf of a project which he very much desired, namely, the restoration of some forty million dollars' worth of lend-lease which the Russians claimed due them by some distortion of logic. The Secretary of State announced that he approached the gentlemen of the Congress as personal friends to plead in that capacity for this appropriation, "We must," he said, and I am relying upon the memory of my colleague, "in our relations with Soviet Russia be, like Caesar's wife, above reproach. We must give them no reason whatever to feel that we have not lived up to every commitment we have made." The Secretary was asked if he knew what the forty million dollars represented in the way of goods. He said that he did not, not having the schedules with him. Whereupon he was told that, among other things, the schedules in question called for two plants, earmarked for Siberia, for converting gasoline into high octane fuel for aviation purposes. Marshall failed to win his case.
The principal advantage to the United States of the Moscow Conference, as I see it, was that it took Marshall out of Washington while the policy of aid to Greece and Turkey was being formed. Given his militant aversion to supporting British interests in the Mediterranean, which we have seen, we can scarcely believe that he would have been a genuine advocate of the Forrestal plan in the eastern Mediterranean. I regard the assistance we voted to Greece and Turkey as the most statesmanlike approach made by the Truman administration to the whole postwar problem of the containment of Russia.
With the Truman Doctrine, Marshall had nothing to do. He was the author of the Marshall Plan. Between the two concepts and programs there is the difference of night and day, although they have become inseparably united in the public mind under the impact of administration propaganda. It is no doubt generally supposed that, as Jonathan Daniels puts it on page 321 of his book The Man of Independence, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Atlantic Pact "all were steps in one plan and parts of the policy of one man." He is referring to the man from Independence. Nothing could be more misleading.
We are all familiar with the rapid events which in March of 1947 brought our quick acceptance of the British burden of support for Greece and Turkey. Its chief supporter in the highest administration circles was the late James V. Forrestal, a complex, gifted statesman, who saw with as much clarity as any American the drift of events toward Russian expansion. Because of his strong services rendered in this cause, Forrestal was marked for destruction by the Soviet apparatus in this country.
The character assassination of Jim Forrestal was led by Drew Pearson, that master of snidery and venom. How much Forrestal's derangement and eventual tragic death came as the result of the campaign by Pearson and the other Communist camp followers to injure his faith and credit and reflect upon his gallantry and courage, I do not know. I can only say that their task was to destroy him.
In reporting that Marshall had no part whatever in the discussions of the Forrestal program for Greece and Turkey, I am relying upon the recollections of a man who was at the time high in the confidence of the White House.
The situation at the time seemed to those around the President most urgent. He therefore cut short a vacation to hurry home, and on March 12 asked Congress to support an aid program for those countries to preserve them from Communist aggressions, actual and feared. The President asked for $400,000,000 for Greece and $150,000,000 for Turkey. What were these sums for? Primarily, to strengthen the military forces of the countries, only secondarily to assist them economically, and emphasis was put on the rebuilding of harbor installations and railways in Greece for military purposes. This was a policy that made sense from the point of view of America's world politics. It served the interest of the United States and the West, but not the Kremlin. The Congress passed it by overwhelming majorities in both Houses.
The staunch Americans who, like Forrestal, believed that the steady encroachment of Soviet imperial purposes must be confronted by evidences of America's will to resist, were enormously encouraged. That they were momentarily in the ascendant at the White House was seen when the President went on to put the policy into a larger frame.
The enlargement of the Forrestal Greek-Turkish aid measure into the Truman Doctrine came on May 8. On that date Dean Acheson addressed an audience in Cleveland, Mississippi. Because Truman was staying close to the White House telephone for word from the sick room of his aged mother in Grandview, Missouri, he had seen fit not to deliver a speech prepared for him at Cleveland and had deputized Acheson to substitute for him. It was an important speech. So muddled has been the thinking on this subject that it is generally held to have been a prior enunciation of the Marshall Plan, which first saw the light in a speech by Secretary of State Marshall at Harvard University nearly a month later, on June 5.
Actually, the only similarity between the Cleveland speech and the Cambridge speech is that they both envisaged enormous transfers of money from the pockets of the American taxpayers to those of other lands.
At Cleveland, Acheson said:
"Since world demand exceeds our ability to supply, we are going to have to concentrate our emergency assistance in areas where it will be most effective in building world political and economic stability, in promoting human freedom and democratic institutions, in fostering liberal trading policies, and in strengthening the authority of the United Nations."
How would the United States Government determine where its assistance would be sent? I quote the answer given by Acheson at Cleveland:
"Free peoples who are seeking to preserve their independence and democratic institutions and human freedoms against totalitarian pressures, either internal or external, will receive top priority for American reconstruction aid. This is no more than frank recognition that, as President Truman said, "Totalitarian regimes imposed on free people, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States."
Keep in mind this was not Acheson speaking; this was Truman's speech. He had been given it to read—a speech drafted under Forrestal's thinking and not the thinking of Acheson and Marshall.
We may suppose this speech found little favor in the Kremlin. The prospect of the United States pouring out its limitless treasure to support the enemies of Soviet aggression, direct or indirect, could not be welcome to the masters of Russian policy. The means test, the test which signified that only countries prepared to resist Russian world policy could qualify, must have been especially irksome. It could easily have been clear to Stalin that such a policy, strengthening the political and military resources of lands in the path of Soviet ambition, and followed as a logical corollary by an effective military alliance among the free nations, would be infinitely troublesome to his plans.
So rested the matter when the President, on May 17, flew to Kansas City to be at the bedside of his dying mother. He was absent from Washington until after she died on June 26, transacting the Government's business in his penthouse suite atop the Hotel Muehlbach in Kansas City. In his absence, Secretary Marshall and his advisers—I wish we knew who all of them were—wrote the speech that launched the Marshall Plan. I wonder if the President, harassed as he was by grief, attending his mother several hours a day, ever passed upon that speech or whether it was represented to him as it has been steadily represented to the country ever since, as a complement to, a fulfillment of, the Truman Doctrine, and hence something he need not see and study.
What Marshall said at Cambridge after depicting the disorganization of European economies, the hunger and scarcities obtaining there, was this:
"It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace."
Was there to be any discrimination in the assistance envisaged by the Secretary of State, any means test based on resistance to Soviet encroachments and machinations? No, indeed:
"Our policy is directed not against any country, or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis as various crises develop [a direct hit at the Greek-Turkish aid program]. Any assistance that this Government may render in the furure should provide a cure rather than a palliative."
Who is to get the assistance?
"Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States Government. Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us. Furthermore, governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States."
Need I point out to you that the Marshall Plan made mincemeat of the Truman-Forrestal doctrine? The last sentences were, of course, window dressing, a restatement of the Truman-Forrestal doctrine in innocuous words with no point whatsoever. Their insincerity was plainly shown when the benefits of the Marshall Plan were promptly offered to Russia and her satellites. Need I elaborare the point that, whereas the Truman-Forrestal doctrine offered our wealth to like-minded countries, striving to combat communism, externally and internally, the Marshall Plan eradicates that purpose? Need I say that the one bade fair to forge the free world into a great and vital instrument with which to confront Soviet imperialism, the other reduced the whole splendid concept of Acheson speaking Forrestal's mind at Cleveland into a mere charity enterprise, without political content, and without political value to the United States? What Marshall did, to borrow the facetious language of some opponents of his plan, was to put Europe on the WPA.
The Forrestal plan would have strengthened us in the conflict with Russia. The result of using the Marshall Plan instead of the Forrestal plan in Europe has been to make us the patsy of the modern world, to arouse the contempt and suspicion of Europe and to leave us in the summer of 1951, heavily engaged in Asia, and with no willing, reliable allies in all Europe among the beneficiaries of our bounty except Greece and Turkey and, a country that had no seat at the table at all, Spain, plus Western Germany, whose resources we cannot use in the struggle against international communism because her 48,000,000 people, according to the State Department, are not peace loving.
The Truman-Forrestal doctrine's means test would have included Spain. The Marshall Plan excluded Spain, although it included Russia in its intent.
I do not think this monstrous perversion of sound and understandable national policy was accidental. I think it was an evil hoax on the generosity, good will and carelessness of the American people. I think it was the product of a will and intention hostile to this free society.
The Marshall Plan was received with a clamorous acclaim from the leftist, liberal intellectuals. Those who spoke against it, who sought to point out the dire discrepancy between it and the Truman Doctrine, were howled down as ungenerous reactionaries. I voted for the Marshall Plan. As I said at the time, I voted for the Marshall Plan because it had some good aspects, for example, the feeding of the starving people of Europe. I strongly maintained then that the food and clothing which we were giving should be on the basis of need of the people themselves rather than a gift to the governments involved, which sold it to starving people on the basis of ability to pay. Another point which I maintained at that time was that the money for the rehabilitation of industry should have been loaned directly to the industry in question, taking back what security that industry had to offer regardless of how valueless the security might be, instead of funneling the money through tottering, corrupt, and socialistic governments as the Marshall Plan proposed to do.
Nevertheless, in the end I voted for it because it was a case of Marshall Plan aid for Europe or nothing. I am not too sure today that nothing might not have been better.
Of all Marshall's significant endeavors since the early months of World War II, the derricking of the Forrestal plan ranks next, I should judge, to the Marshall policy for China in its massive helpfulness to the world ambitions of the Kremlin. That judgment is in no way impaired by the fact that Russia declined and forbade its satellites to share in the Marshall Plan's bounty.
There were good and sufficient reasons for that attitude from the Russian viewpoint. Two will immediately occur to anyone who thinks of it. To accept it meant to disparage in the eyes of the world the industrial magnitude, the might and prestige of the great rival of the United States, Russia. The acceptance of this assistance would like wise have meant the intrusion of United States representatives in the affairs of the satellites—although, given the political nature of so many of the men and women who have represented this country abroad under UNRRA and EGA, that could not have been the major disability that it no doubt seemed to the Kremlin—and a certain interference with their economies. The Kremlin could not, it is patent to me, have allowed to arise among the millions of its unwilling vassals sentiments of gratitude for this free country.
I have often wondered whence came the inspiration for the Marshall Plan in the mind of its author. Why should he conceive that we needed another plan when we already had the Truman-Forrestal plan? What called for his intervention in this matter? The country, except for those who serve Soviet interest, was content with the Truman Doctrine. There were no objections from abroad save from the Kremlin alone. Who prompted Marshall?
I have found one clue that offers some promise. I have here a book by Earl Browder entitled Teheran—Our Path in War and Peace. It is a highly informative book that deserves a wider reading among those who would like to make sense and order out of our national policies in recent years. In his book, Browder gives us the true significance of Teheran from the viewpoint of Russia, finding great cause for rejoicing in the solidarity of American and Russian interest at that conference. There is more to the book than that. I find in it almost textually exact the blueprint for unlimited, indiscriminate benevolence abroad comprehended in the Marshall Plan. In fact, in 1945 Browder in his book gave almost a complete blueprint of the Marshall Plan and of the administration's Point 4 program.
Let us again briefly compare at this time the Forrestal plan—erroneously named the Truman plan—for Greece and Turkey with the Acheson-Marshall plan for Europe.
The Forrestal plan—which Truman fortunately adopted for Greece and Turkey—provided for all the necessary military aid to people who themselves were willing to fight communism—enough military aid to make them strong enough to withstand international communism. While sufficient economic aid was given to make the military aid effective and workable, the emphasis at all times was to be on military aid. The Forrestal plan proved very successful.
The Marshall Plan was directly opposite to the Forrestal plan for Greece and Turkey. It consisted of giving the maximum economic aid with no thought whatsoever of any military defense of Western Europe. In fact, the overall purpose was to build up the area economically and keep it defenseless from a military standpoint. The Marshall Plan fitted perfectly with Communist Russia's desire for a power vacuum in all of Western Europe.
The recommendations of Washington in the summer of 1947 were something like this: Hundreds of millions for Greece and Turkey to help preserve them from being engulfed by the tide of Soviet imperialism, billions in economic aid for Europe—not one cent for the Republic of China.
The Secretary of State, having opened the Treasury gates for his massive and unrewarding boondoggle throughout Europe, made no mention whatsoever of aid to China. It was only after the Eightieth Congress indicated that they would look with disfavor on aid to Europe unless aid to China were included in the plan that the State Department proposed a similar non-military grant to China. It called for $570,000,000 over a fifteen-month period. Marshall stipulated in the bill he sent to Congress that the money should go alike to his friends, the Yenan Reds, and our friends, the Republic of China.
I deal now with the extraordinary campaign of deception practiced upon this Congress regarding aid to China. Acheson's testimony before the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees in June of 1951 was a piece of organized fabrication on so vast a scale as to have excited the envy of Ananias.
Acheson repeated the assertion that this Government between VJ-Day and 1949 gave China $2,000,000,000 in grants and credit, He scraped the bottom of the barrel to arrive at that figure. It includes lend-lease left over from the war to the tune of several hundred millions. It includes nearly a half million estimated to be the United States share of UNRRA for China—our friends and the Yenan Reds alike sharing in this. It includes about $600,000, 000 for "services," the principal part of which was the cost of transporting the Republic of China's armies into northern and eastern China and Manchuria to accept the surrender of the Japanese—as much our job as theirs. It includes perhaps a hundred million in loan for internal reconstruction. If we were to believe Acheson, half of the two billions was "military aid." That is the most preposterous aspect of his great deception. Anyone who studies the record will find, as I have found, that the only military aid given the Republic of China, either as grants or credits, from VJ-Day to 1949 consisted of this:
Why did Marshall and Acheson seek to deceive the people about this? The record is open. We failed to assist the Republic of China in its war with world communism, represented by the Yenan Reds. In fact, it was the declared and consistent policy of this administration to refuse to assist our friends.
I refer to Truman's statement of policy of December 18, 1946, where, after all the evidence of Russian intentions to dominate all governments in which they were allowed to enter had been thoroughly disseminated through the western world, he demands in stern tones that Chiang Kai-shek accept the recalcitrant Yenan Reds on pain of incurring his displeasure. I want particularly to stress Truman's apologetic reference to the surplus stores, and I quote the President's words:
"China agreed to buy all surplus property owned by the United States in China and on 17 Pacific islands and bases . . . especially in view of the rapid deterioration of the material in open storage under tropical conditions and the urgent need for the partial alleviation of the acute economic distress of the Chinese people . . . Aircraft, all nondemilitarized combat material and fixed installations outside of China were excluded. [This was done at Marshall's insistence upon the urging of the Yenan Reds when the Nationalists were winning the civil war.] Thus, no weapons which could be used in fighting a civil war were made available through this agreement."
When Acheson said in the foreword to the White Paper that:
"The second objective of assisting the National Government . . . we pursued vigorously from 1945 to 1949."
He is deliberately attempting to deceive. Not only did we not assist them affirmatively, but Marshall shut off what they had coming to them by his embargo and in the surplus stores. I shall offer one final proof of Acheson's moral turpitude in this matter.
First I quote from testimony of Acheson before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House on March 20, 1947, when he opposed military advice and supplies to China, saying:
"The Chinese Government is not in the position at the present time that the Greek Government is in. It is not approaching collapse. It is not threatened by defeat by the Communists. The war with the Communists is going on much as it has for the last 20 years."
Next I quote from the White Paper letter of transmittal where Acheson said that the action which he was against in 1947, because it was unnecessary then, was too late to do any good in 1949:
"The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the Government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it."
I hope that I never have to face an angry God with a lie of that enormity on my conscience. The plain fact is that we not only did not assist the Republic of China to avoid "the ominous result of the civil war in China" but we did everything we could, short of arming and leading the Yenan Reds, to give the decision to them. For this result two men are more responsible than any other Americans, and their names are George Catlett Marshall and Dean Gooderham Acheson.
And so we come to another attempt to hide, to prevaricate, to deceive. This concerns the Wedemeyer mission to China. Already in 1947 the public was stirring in curiosity over the deplorable and dangerous trend of events in China. Already the friends of China were asking why, if we could so munificently assume the British burden, we could not take care of our important interest in China? So Wedemeyer was sent to China in the summer of 1947.
He returned in September and rendered to the President his report, a report which I cannot commend too highly for objectivity, for candor and, above all, for its sound realization that Russia was on the march in China to our potential disaster. The Republic of China still had the upper hand militarily when Wedemeyer was there, although the problem of supply was growing more acute day by day and he recommended measures to relieve it.
The Wedemeyer report utterly displeased General Marshall for reasons we shall come to later. At first, Marshall thought it might be modified so that it would suit his long-range purpose. A crew of State Department officials was put to the task of rewriting the report. I would like to know if it included Hiss and Vincent. Wedemeyer declined to sign a distorted report. And so Marshall pocketed the whole thing, keeping it suppressed for nearly two years until it was inserted among the annexes of the White Paper.
Why did Marshall bottle up the Wedemeyer report? The true answer is found in the nature and language of that report, which is a plain repudiation of the intent of his policy and mission. Two pretexts were put forward by Marshall. One, which was given to satisfy a request for publication by the late Senator from Michigan, Arthur Vandenburg, who was then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was in toto false. The second answer was ambiguous but indicative of the goal and purpose of Marshall's China policy.
I have photostatic copies of two letters addressed by Senator Vandenberg to Alfred Kohlberg, a staunch American, without whose indefatigable efforts to expose the truth we might already have been totally lost in Asia. The first Vandenberg letter, dated November 24, 1947, said:
"It is my opinion that there is nothing to be gained for China by its [the Wedemeyer report's] publication—and I think I speak as a proven friend of China. I give you one example—confidentially. The report is replete with quotations of many prominent people (both Chinese and Americans) whose opinions were obtained under the seal of confidence, I am advised on what I consider to be unimpeachable authority that this is the fact."
Kohlberg replied, expressing his fears that
"A conspiratorial group in the State Department, and possibly in the administrative office of the President, and possibly in the Bureau of the Budget, have objectives in the Far East that conflict with our proclaimed open-door policy."
And further stated that he was under the impression that:
"The so-called bi-partisan foreign policy is being used as a shield to cover objectives which are hidden from the Republicans, like yourself, concerned with that policy."
On December 31, 1947, Senator Vandenberg again wrote Kohlberg in reassurance concerning the Wedemeyer report, referring to his previous letter and saying:
"My statement to you in my letter of November 24 regarding the Wedemeyer report was based upon a direct and specific statement to me by Secretary of State Marshall."
The Wedemeyer report finally saw the light of day despite Marshall's opposition. Are there in it any confidential statements ascribed to any Chinese or Americans such as the first Vandenberg letter relates? Certainly not. What can we make of this clear and explicit accusation from beyond the grave? Only this, that Marshall manufactured this excuse out of whole cloth. That, in short, he lied; as he lied on the witness stand in September 1950 about the authorship of the China policy; as he lied about his whereabouts on the morning of Pearl Harbor Day, saying first that he was horseback riding, then that he was at home at Fort Myer, when, in Arthur Upham Pope's book on Litvinoff, Marshall's name appears as one of those Americans who met the Russian Ambassador when he arrived by plane in Washington on that morning. This latter incident I have already placed in the Congressional Record.
What can we make of this succession of untruths? What of the character of their author? There was a time when the word of an officer of the United States Army or Navy was as good as his bond. Veracity was bred in the bone and fiber of our officers corps, at their academies and throughout their careers. We honored them for it and took pride in their honor. General Marshall was at the head of our armed services. Quite apart from the destructive nature of his public acts since the beginning of World War II, I ask in all gravity, whether a man so frequently taken in falsehood, who has recourse to the lie whenever it suits his convenience, was fit to hold a place where he must be a model to the officers and enlisted men and women of our armed services?
The second and public reason given for suppressing the Wedemeyer report was that in it Wedemeyer recommended a trusteeship for Manchuria. It is true that Wedemeyer did so recommend. The inference drawn in this excuse was that its publication would have been offensive to the Republic of China. The disingenuousness of that excuse is at once apparent if we refer to China's position in 1947, with its continued possession of Manchuria touch and go, and to the brusque and contemptuous treatment which had been meted to Chiang Kai-shek by Truman and Marshall since December of 1945. Since when were we considering the feelings of the Republic of China? You need not seek far to find the real reason lurking behind this avowed one. Whom would such a proposal really offend? Not China, but Russia—the Russia which had, as a result of the Yalta deal, a hammerlock on Manchuria which it proposed not to relax, sharing it, if at all, and nominally only, with its creatures of Yenan.
So we see that the excuse based upon the trusteeship proposal was a species of deceit also. The genuine reason fits perfectly into the whole pattern of the China policy, being part and parcel of the scheme hatched in the fall of 1945, with Marshall as its chief exponent, to deliver China, and with it all Asia, to the Soviet empire.
We come to the bona-fide reason for the suppression of the Wedemeyer report in the fall of 1947, when, I bid the reader note, China still had a chance to fight off the Red imperialists with our assistance. By 1949, when the report found its way into public attention, that hope had vanished and the Marshall plan for China was, to all intents and purposes, crowned with success. The overwhelming reason for the suppression was that the Wedemeyer report in almost every line, directly and indirectly, repudiated the Marshall policy. Wedemeyer did point out the need for reform in the Chinese Government. One wonders whether reform was needed more in China than within our own Government, as evidenced by the odorous 5-percenter investigation, the deep freezes, the mink coats, the fixes in criminal cases and in RFC loans, the combine of gamblers and Government officials. No one in this Nation has urged, as Marshall did in China, that because this Government is corrupt, we should turn it over to the Communists. Incidentally, Acheson, before the Russell Committee, dealt almost exclusively with the small section of the Wedemeyer report dealing with corruption in China,
Why was the Wedemeyer report really suppressed?
Marshall wholly ignored the question of Russia, omitting any reference to it in his valedictory.
The whole of Wedemeyer's general statement to the President was instinct with the urgency of that question. I shall quote passages illustrating this point, resisting the temptation to quote all of the Wedemeyer report:
"The goals and the lofty aims of freedom-loving peoples are jeopardized today by forces as sinister as those that operated in Europe and Asia during the 10 years leading to World War II. The pattern is familiar—employment of subversive agents; infiltration tactics; incitement to disorder and chaos to disrupt normal economy and thereby to undermine popular confidence in government and leaders; seizure of authority without reference to the will of the people—all the techniques skillfully designed and ruthlessly implemented in order to create favorable conditions for the imposition of totalitarian ideologies. This pattern is present in the Far East, particularly in the areas contiguous to Siberia."
In other words, Manchuria.
Why did Wedemeyer propose a trusteeship for Manchuria? Was it against the interest of China? I quote further from his report:
"The situation in Manchuria has deteriorated to such a degree that prompt action is necessary to prevent that area becoming a Soviet satellite. . . . This would create a difficult situation for China, the United States, and the United Nations. Ultimately it could lead to a Communist-dominated China."
What can be done in general to meet the threat to the peace contained in Soviet imperialism?
"Events of the past 2 years demonstrate the futility of appeasement based on the hope that the strongly consolidated forces of the Soviet Union will adopt either a conciliatory or a cooperative attitude except as tactical expedients. Soviet practice in the countries already occupied or dominated completes the mosaic of aggressive expansion through ruthless secret police methods and through an increasing political and economic enslavement of peoples. Soviet literature, confirmed repeatedly by Communist leaders, reveals a definite plan for expansion far exceeding that of Naziism in its ambitious scope and dangerous implications.
"Therefore in attempting a solution to the problem presented in the Far East . . . every possible opportunity must be used to seize the initiative in order to create bulwarks of freedom."
How did our difficulties arise in the Far East?
"Indirectly the United States facilitated the Soviet program in the Far East by agreeing at the Yalta Conference to Russian reentry into Manchuria and later by withholding aid from the Nationalist Government."
Wedemeyer proposed that the whole problem be referred to the United Nations; that the United Nations set up a trusteeship over Manchuria; that China give continuing evidence of a will to reform her governmental structure; and that the United States supply official advisers, military and civilian, to assist China in those reforms.
What evidence does General Wedemeyer's report offer on whether or not we supplied China? In his testimony of June 4, before the Russell Committee, Dean Acheson said:
"Although his [Wedemeyer's] actual recommendations do not call for a grant of military aid, it is possible to read that in."
Although in September 1947 the forces of the Republic of China had invaded and captured Yenan, the situation in Manchuria had reached a point where, said Wedemeyer on page 808 of the White Paper, "prompt action is necessary to prevent Manchuria from becoming a Soviet satellite." Elsewhere the Nationalist forces faced severe stringencies and suffered from poor strategical leadership. Said Wedemeyer:
"It is doubtful if Gen. Chen Cheng [the new Nationalist commander in Manchuria] can weld a strong unified force in view of the continued serious shortages of both supplies and capable subordinates."
The Yenan Reds had no shortages of supplies and trained captains, both being furnished by Russia.
What did Wedemeyer think of the importance of China to the American position in the Far East? I quote from page 809 of the White Paper:
"Any further spread of Soviet influence and power would be inimical to United States strategic interests. In the time of war the existence of an unfriendly China would result in denying us important air bases for use as staging areas for bombing attacks as well as important naval bases along the Chinese coast. Its control by the Soviet Union or a regime friendly to the Soviet Union would make available for hostile use a number of warm-water ports and air bases. Our own air and naval bases in Japan, [the] Ryukyus and the Philippines would be subject to relatively short-range neutralizing air attacks. Furthermore, industrial and military developments of Siberia east of Lake Baikal would probably make the Manchurian area more or less self-sufficient.
"On the other hand, a unified China friendly or allied to the United States would not only provide important air and naval bases, but also from the standpoint of its size and manpower, be an important ally to the United States."
These strategic lessons are elementary to any consideration of the relationship of the United States to the Far East. Recognizing them, Wedemeyer's advice, explicit and implicit, is that we hold and preserve China as an ally. If General Wedemeyer understood matters in this sense, were they not understandable also to General Marshall? He, like Wedemeyer, is a professional soldier, trained to the understanding of strategy.
What did Wedemeyer recommend that we do in detail to bolster China in its civil war on the Yenan Reds? He had a six-point program.
First, China had 16,000 motor vehicles which it could not use, chiefly trucks, because of the lack of spare parts which we had agreed to supply but hadn't.
"The United States [said Wedemeyer] is morally obligated to complete this program."
Secondly, the United States should enable the Chinese to buy military equipment. He said, and I quote from page 811.
"Since completion of the 39-division program nearly 2 years ago very little has been supplied. Thus there are many shortages in military equipment which react to the disadvantage of Nationalist military efforts. Credits should be established for China to purchase the necessary military equipment needed to effect a supervised revitalization of her ground and air forces. Without such aid American equipment purchased during and subsequent to the war is, or soon will be, valueless since maintenance parts will not be available to keep the equipment in use."
What does that do to Acheson's billion dollars in military aid furnished China between VJ-Day and 1949? What a monstrous deception that has been. The Secretary of State has repeatedly declared that the Republic of China lost no battles because of a lack of equipment and ammunition. What did Wedemeyer say bearing upon the future of the civil war in September 1947?
"In July the Navy abandoned 335 tons of ammunition in Tsingtao, which was recovered by Nationalists. However, Nationalist armies continue to complain of shortages of ammunition of all types and calibers. There will be severe shortages in the near future unless replenishment from foreign sources is accomplished.
"There is an implied moral obligation to assist the Chinese Government to obtain ammunition."
In conclusion, Wedemeyer recommended and I quote from page 814:
"That the United States provide as early as practicable moral, advisory, and material support to China in order to prevent Manchuria from becoming a Soviet satellite, to bolster opposition to Communist expansion, and to contribute to the gradual development of stability in China."
Could you ask for a more forthrightly American program? Can you wonder that Marshall, bent on other aims, suppressed this report?
Six months later, on March 10, 1948, months during which the situation in China had gone, from the American viewpoint, from bad to worse, Marshall was asked at a press conference whether the directive of December 1945, demanding a unified government of China, was still our policy. He said that it was, an answer which threw the State Department into a dither. No one but Marshall was openly supporting that policy by the spring of 1948. So the Department sought to extricate him, issuing a statement the next day which made it appear that Marshall had been confused. They said that he had thought the question had to do with the President's statement of December 15, 1945, which, of course, it did. Others in the Department of State then edited what the Secretary had said to make it appear that what he really said was that, the Communists being in open rebellion in China, the matter of their inclusion in the Government was for the Chinese, not the American Government, to decide.
The President, too, was utterly confused at this point. On March 11, at a White House press conference, he was asked the same question, "Do you still insist upon Communists in the Chinese Government?" The statement of December 15, 1945, "still stood," replied Truman. He confounded his American interviewers by adding the contradictory explanation that, however, "we did not want Communists in the Government of China or anywhere else if we could help it."
The questions of March 10 and 11 had been prompted by public discussion of aid to China. Such demands were rising. We then had the Eightieth Congress. The friends of China had friends in this court. And so the Congress, rejecting Marshall's nonmilitary $780,000,000 bill, appropriated $275,000,000 for economic aid and $125,000,000 for arms to help Chiang Kai-shek at that late hour stand against Soviet imperialism. This sum, inadequate though it was, might have been effective had it been immediately translated into the ammunition for lack of which the armies of the Republic of China were being beaten, were defecting, or fading away.
What ensued is one of the most shocking subversions of the will of the Congress that our history will show. If proof were needed that the State Department, under Marshall and Acheson, and sheltered by a wholly uncomprehending and pliant President, were intent upon delivering China to Russia, that proof was afforded by their administration of the China-aid bill of 1948.
Nothing was done for two months. The Chinese Ambassador had been pleading in vain for implementation. On June 2 the Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. Bridges, having sent a strong note to the White House concerning this delay, the President wrote the State and Treasury Departments, in effect authorizing them to move. But the President, relying upon his State Department advisers, had gummed up the works. I am sure this was intentional on their part. He had authorized the executive agencies to buy military supplies only from commercial suppliers. No supplies were available from those sources. Not until July 28, four months after the act was passed, was the Defense Department empowered to issue material from its own stocks,
Not until November 9, more than seven months after Congress spoke, did the first shipment clear from Seattle for China. China was finally lost during those months. This is not the end of this wretched story. Not only was the will of Congress frustrated for more than half a year, but China got only half as much in the way of military supplies as Congress had supposed she would. The prices fixed upon the supplies by the Army were exorbitant. Congress had expected China to be treated as had all other countries which drew from our stores, that is, that she would be charged the cheap, surplus price charged the others. Instead of that, and I am taking the figures from Miss Utley's book The China Story, China paid for bazookas $162 apiece, the surplus price being $3.65; for 30-caliber rifles she paid $51 each, the surplus price being $5.10; for a thousand rounds of rifle ammunition $85, the surplus price being $4.55; and for machine-gun ammunition per thousand rounds, $95, the surplus price, being $4.58. Those figures appear in Miss Utley's book. I have not myself checked them; therefore, I ask the Department of the Army to submit to the appropriate committee of the Senate the price lists that it charged the Chinese.
I shall not further elaborate this appalling chapter in the betrayal of China. As it demonstrates, Marshall was still implacably against the Republic of China. And he never relented. Only a few weeks before he resigned as Secretary of State, Marshall was attending the Assembly of the United Nations in Paris. There he was approached by Dr. T. S. Tsiang, the Chinese delegate, who, and I find this on page 887 of the White Paper, implored Marshall for assistance. Tsiang asked that the United States recognize the need for expert military leadership by sending United States officers to actual command of the Republican armies and that the United States expedite the supply of munitions; and he asked Marshall's advice about laying China's plight before the United Nations, as Wedemeyer had proposed.
In his report on the incident to Under Secretary Lovett at Washington Marshall said:
"I did not offer encouragement beyond present efforts."
Respecting Tsiang's United Nations inquiry, Marshall reported:
"I said I would have to consult my colleagues of the United States delegation to develop various possibilities; that offhand I thought it an inadvisable procedure and discussed possible Soviet moves to take advantage rather than to counter such a move."
The sense of the foregoing is difficult to arrive at. What can be easily gathered is that Marshall was, as usual, sensitive to Russia's plans, aims, and prospects.
The final, definitive word was given on the Marshall China policy in January of 1949. By then the friends of the Yenan Reds, who are, of course, by definition, the enemies of America and the West, were jubilant. Marshall's policy was a success. There remained the task of explaining to the faithful how it had been accomplished. There remained a bit of crowing to do over the corpse of China and the decline of America's position in the Far East. This task was assumed by, or delegated to, Owen Lattimore. There has been a controversy over whether Owen Lattimore if a conscious agent of Soviet imperialism. I know that he is and I know that in the fullness of time that fact will be established.
On the editorial page of the Sunday Compass of New York, July 17, 1949, is an article by Owen Lattimore, with the exultant heading, "South Korea—another China." Lattimore is discussing the proposals, then before Congress, for a grant to South Korea of $150,000,000. Dean Acheson had made what Lattimore called a "strong appeal" for that appropriation before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Lattimore went on to point out that at this same time we were withdrawing our troops from South Korea. The conjunction of these events was clear to Lattimore, and he was explaining them to the faithful who read the Compass, a demonstration of the Communist planned duplicity of American. policy, a policy which he said "is now conducted under rules of protocol which have become as rigid as tribal taboos." If we may paraphrase Lattimore's words, the United States was then pursuing one policy with two contradictory horns. Upon the one horn, we were appearing to be standing in friendly sponsorship of South Korea; on the other we were preparing to let her fall into the maw of Russian imperialism. George Marshall's part in this conspiracy is stated in Lattimore's words thus:
"There is logic to the course of action advocated by Secretary Acheson. It is, moreover, a perfectly convincing logic. . . For the logic we must go back to the sad precedent of China. The truth is that Gen. George C. Marshall, on his mission to China in 1946 . . . became convinced of several unpleasant things which, because of the state of political opinion in America, could not be stated out loud."
Note that Lattimore is interpreting the secret mind of George Marshall as one having authority. I continue:
"First, he was convinced that the Kuomintang would not be able to triumph over the Chinese Communists unless it took American advice. Second, he was convinced that politically and militarily America could not handle the situation in China by taking the Kuomintang by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and making it behave. Yet he could not, as a statesman, advise what seemed sensible to him as a General—that the United States simply pull out and abandon an untenable position."
I come to the operative part of this astounding recital of the problem of China:
"As a compromise, American policy took a course of relative inaction, but not complete inaction. As it became more and more obvious that Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang were doomed, the conduct of American policy became increasingly delicate. The problem—. . ."
and here we have reached the inner chamber, the arcanum, of the Marshall plan for China—
"was how to allow them to fall without making it look as if the United States had pushed them. Such a policy never succeeds completely [that is, it cannot be wholly concealed] and critics have done their best to make the public believe that the United States did push Chiang and the Kuomintang over the cliff."
There you have the complete, sinister, treacherous, traitorous picture—here is the modus operandi written to instruct the Communists and Communist sympathizers which, alone, read the Compass. This is a secret communication, in effect, letting the faithful in on the secret of how the Marshall policy worked.
Can anyone doubt, after the lengthy documentation which I have presented from the pens of the principal actors of this period and from other records, including the White Paper, that Lattimore was speaking the truth?
So, he went on, it was to be with Korea:
"The thing to do, therefore, is to let South Korea fall—but not to let it look as though we pushed it. Hence, the recommendation of a parting grant of $150,000,000."