Harry Truman (52 page)

At the Paris foreign ministers conference in June 1949, the Russians were on the defensive for the first time. Andrei Vishinsky, their chief spokesman, was an almost pathetic figure, afraid to agree even on a statement about the weather without discussing it with an angry, sullen Stalin in Moscow.

Now, a revived and powerful Western Europe is accepted as a matter of course. The history of the world would have changed if Western Europe, with its enormous industrial and scientific potential, had become part of the Communist empire.

But NATO was more than a dam to hold back the threatening Communist flood. In Dad’s view, it was another step toward achieving the necessary economic and military strength to negotiate with the Russians as equals. Experience had taught him that force - equality or superiority of force - was the only thing the Russians understood. Even before he was reelected, he had begun the fight to restore our depleted military strength. On May 7, 1948, for instance, he made the following memorandum:

My father’s critical comment on Forrestal should not be construed as his final judgment on the man. He was a dedicated American, who literally wore himself out in the service of his country. He had done a tremendous job in the struggle to unify the armed services, and Dad had made him the first Secretary of Defense. Forrestal was equally dedicated to Dad. In a letter to a fellow Cabinet member, he called him “the best boss I have ever known.” After the armed services unification bill was fought through Congress, he wrote him the following letter:

The indecision which Forrestal displayed on rearming and in the Berlin crisis may well have been the first symptoms of the tragic mental breakdown he suffered after he left the Cabinet early in 1949 - a breakdown that culminated in his suicide in May of that year.

Trying to persuade Congress to give the country the balanced defense force he wanted was a terribly frustrating job, as Dad’s memo makes clear. The services themselves were uncooperative, each lobbying fiercely for the biggest possible slice of the pie. Complicating the struggle was the problem of rearming Western Europe - the next logical step beyond the NATO treaty. The Soviet Union had thirty divisions in Eastern Europe, all armed with the latest weapons. We had three and a half, plus two and a half British divisions. The French and other nations could field perhaps a dozen divisions, but they were equipped with antiquated guns, obsolete tanks, and inferior air support. To give you an idea of how weak we were at this time, for a reserve force we had in the United States only a pitiful two and one-third divisions. The logical and obvious step was to rearm our friends in Europe as swiftly as possible. So, on July 25, 1949, Dad sent to Congress a request for $1,400,000,000 for this purpose.

The reaction of the Congress was almost unbelievable. You would think they had never even heard of the North Atlantic Treaty. Senator Vandenberg deserted his bipartisan role to make a wild attack on the bill, and he was joined by Walter George, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Fulbright. In the House of Representatives, desperate pleas by Speaker Sam Rayburn were ignored, and there was a reckless vote to cut the appropriation in half. My father had to pull out all the stops in a speech to the Golden Jubilee Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, on August 22, 1949, to turn the situation around: “The cost of such a program is considerable, but it represents an investment in security that will be worth many times its cost. It is part of the price of peace. Which is better, to make expenditures to save the peace, or to risk all our resources and assets in another war?”

There was a reason for the collapse of bipartisan support in the Congress for Dad’s foreign policy - a reason that had nothing to do with the Russian threat in Europe or the wisdom of helping free nations resist it. In the spring of 1949, the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek began to fall apart, and the Generalissimo prepared to flee to Formosa with the remnant of his followers and China’s monetary reserves. Communist Chinese armies soon controlled all parts of the vast country. Almost immediately, Republicans in Congress began preaching the doctrine that Harry S. Truman’s foreign policy had “lost” China. Most of these critics were the same people who savagely attacked the Marshall Plan and voted against aid to Greece and Turkey. They were the roadblocks to all the creative foreign policy innovations which my father and his administration struggled to extract from a reluctant Congress. What would they have said if the Democratic President had simultaneously proposed a massive program to rescue Chiang Kai-shek? Not only would the cost have been in the billions - the rescue would have necessarily required a 2-or 3-million-man American army. This from a nation that had only two and one-third divisions in reserve.

No American President can make decisions in foreign policy, involving the lives and fortunes of millions of Americans, without the support of Congress and the people. Sometimes, as in the case of Korea, these decisions must be made in an excruciatingly short space of time, and the President must use all the political expertise he possesses to sell his foreign policy to the Congress and the American people. When he fails in this crucial task, the country suffers the kind of instability we experienced after 1965. I think it is evident by now that Harry S. Truman was a master of this aspect of the presidency. It is also evident that Dad was a skillful politician, who kept in contact with the American people. My father knew neither he nor any other man could have sold the American people the idea that their sons, barely returned from the greatest war in history, should abandon their careers and their educations once more, to fight for Chiang Kai-shek.

Thoughtful Republicans knew the truth about China. Senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote in his diary: “If we made ourselves responsible for the army of the Nationalist government, we would be in the China war for keeps and the responsibility would be ours instead of hers. I am sure this would jeopardize our own national security beyond any possibility of justification.” Vandenberg wrote to Senator William F. Knowland of California: “The vital importance of saving China cannot be exaggerated. But there are limits to our resources and boundaries to our miracles. . . .”

The shortest answer to the accusation that we “lost China” is to point out we never owned or possessed it. At the same time, any fair-minded examination of our attempts to save Chiang Kai-shek from losing it will show a President doing everything in his power to prevent this catastrophe. As we have already seen, my father sent the Generalissimo the greatest American soldier of the era, George C. Marshall. When General Marshall saw some of the appalling deficiencies of the Chinese Nationalist army (described in vivid detail in
Stilwell and the American Experience in China
by Barbara Tuchman), it convinced him the Nationalist government’s only hope was a truce and a coalition government with the Communists, who controlled much of North China. This solution might have given Chiang time to pull his spiritless, undisciplined army together, so that he might have survived a test of strength with the Communists at some later date. If he chose to fight, General Marshall advised him to concentrate his forces - a primary military doctrine - and achieve genuine control of southern China before he ventured into North China and Manchuria.

But Chiang arrogantly declined to take any advice from the man whose military genius had helped win World War II. Instead, Chiang launched an ambitious, aggressive attempt to smash the Communists and simultaneously seize control of all China. As a result, he spread his armies disastrously thin, and they lost control of the countryside. Meanwhile, we continued to supply his government with both military and economic aid, to the tune of $2 billion.

My father remained in close touch with the situation, even after General Marshall came home in January 1947, to become Secretary of State. In July of that year, Dad sent Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer to the troubled nation for another personal report. General Wedemeyer, who had commanded American forces in China, saw practically no chance of rescuing the situation. He placed his finger on the central problem of Chiang’s government: “To gain and maintain the confidence of the people, the Central Government will have to effect immediately drastic, far-reaching political and economic reforms. Promises will no longer suffice. Performance is absolutely necessary. It should be accepted that military force in itself will not eliminate Communism.”

By the fall of 1948, the situation was almost beyond hope. Chiang was not only losing the support of the people, he was losing control of his soldiers, too. Whole divisions, with all their American equipment, went over to the Communists. On November 9, 1948, Chiang sent my father a frantic appeal for help.

Around the same time, General David Barr, who was the commanding officer of the U.S. Military Advisory Group in China, sent the following report to the White House: “I am convinced that the military situation has deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of United States troops could effect a remedy. No battle has been lost since my arrival for lack of ammunition or equipment. Their military debacles, in my opinion, can all be attributed to the world’s worst leadership and many other morale destroying factors that led to a complete loss of will to fight.”

A letter to Arthur Vandenberg, written the following year, shows Dad’s thinking on China is clearly rooted in disenchantment with the Nationalist government: “The Far Eastern situation has been a peculiar one, as is often the case in a horse race - we picked a bad horse. That was the development of the situation in China. It turned out that the Nationalist Chinese Government was one of the most corrupt and inefficient that ever made an attempt to govern a country and when I found that out, we stopped furnishing them with materiel. Most of the Communists’ materiel was materiel which was surrendered by the Chinese Nationalist Government for a consideration. If Chiang Kai-shek had been willing to listen to General Marshall, General Wedemeyer and General Dean he never would have found himself in the condition he is in now. After the surrender of Peiping where ammunition, trucks, and artillery materiel we had furnished was turned over to the Communists I cut off everything to the Chinese Government. It had to be done gradually, however, because Nationalists were still holding the line of the Yangtze River and I didn’t want to pull the rug from under Chiang Kai-shek at that time.”

In the next paragraph, my father added, “I think you will find . . . that the Russians will turn out to be the ‘foreign devils’ in China and that situation will help establish a Chinese Government that we can recognize and support.”

On the day after Dad took his oath of office for the second term, Chiang Kai-shek resigned and handed what was left of his government over to General Li Tsung-jen. He was powerless to prevent the onrushing Communists from crossing the Yangtze and seizing south China. On May 5, Dad received a letter from him which, I think, says more about what really happened in China than any other document I have seen on the subject:

In late 1948, the State Department professionals had urged Dad to issue a statement to the American people explaining the gross inadequacies and corruption of the Nationalist government. They were hoping to defend themselves and Dad from the wild accusations about China that were already being flung around by the “China First” politicians in Congress. From the point of view of domestic politics, it was shrewd advice. By taking the offensive on the subject, Dad might easily have saved himself a lot of abuse. As usual, however, he preferred to risk his domestic political reputation for the best interests of the United States abroad. He turned down the idea because it would have administered the coup de grâce to Chiang’s government.

In the summer of 1949, with the Communists in complete control of China, this was no longer a consideration, and my father felt it was only just to himself and to Secretary of State Acheson to make a thorough explanation of what had happened in China to the American people. On August 5, Secretary of State Acheson issued the China White Paper, a massive document, which, with appendices, ran to over 1,000 pages. It detailed overwhelmingly reasons for the Communist victory which I have summarized here.