The China Mission Read online

  Truman’s secretary of state, the South Carolinian James Byrnes, had walked gloating into the White House lunch. Waiting for the president, he told his fellow cabinet members that he had just persuaded Hurley, in Washington for a visit, to go back to China and keep trying. But when Truman entered the room, the sheet in his hand said otherwise. Hurley was resigning, according to a release that had come in over the wire—and not just resigning, but resigning in a paranoid public rage. In a statement, he contended that his difficulties in China stemmed not from any diplomatic missteps, nor from the insolubility of the conflict he was supposed to solve. Hurely instead blamed his problems on subterfuge by a “pro-Communist, pro-imperialist” faction in the American government. (He had railed against this faction before and had a number of diplomats working under him transferred out of China for their supposed allegiance to it.) “The professional foreign service men sided with the Chinese Communist armed party and the imperialist bloc of nations whose policy it was to keep China divided against herself,” he charged. “A considerable section of our State Department is endeavoring to support Communism generally as well as specifically in China.”

  Hurley’s eruption consumed discussion over lunch. It was disquieting in part because it coincided with other pieces of ominous news from across the Pacific. Truman mentioned a report on Soviet actions in Manchuria, the region of northeastern China that Stalin’s Red Army had taken from the Japanese in the final days of the war—and where it was now dismantling factories, power plants, and railway lines and carrying the pieces back toward Siberia. Byrnes mentioned intelligence reporting on Soviet transfers of seized Japanese weapons to Mao’s fighters.

  But the immediate problem raised by Hurley’s charges was political. They would dominate headlines. They would become a weapon for Truman’s opponents. And when, over lunch, a promising solution to this political problem emerged, it came not from the secretary of state or the secretary of war; it came in a suggestion from Clinton Anderson, a New Mexico politico who was serving as secretary of agriculture. To preempt a damaging partisan flap, why not replace Hurley with a man of unquestioned nonpartisan credibility? It would be a triumph of political jujitsu, Anderson argued. Hurley’s self-aggrandizing tantrum would be overshadowed by General of the Army George Catlett Marshall’s selfless return to service—a political crisis remade into a bold diplomatic salvo. James Forrestal, the secretary of the navy, seconded Anderson’s proposal.

  Marshall, a White House aide would say, “in Mr. Truman’s eyes could never do anything wrong.” Other officials used words like “reverence” to describe Truman’s feelings for the general. So Anderson’s proposal had easy appeal for the embattled president. He acknowledged that Marshall had “earned a rest,” with his retirement ceremony the day before and his departure from Washington that very morning. But there was no one in America like Marshall. No one had his stature. No one embodied American might the way he did. No one could solve Truman’s immediate problem, the political problem, the way Marshall could. Perhaps, they reasoned over lunch, Truman could make it a short mission, a temporary appointment. Marshall would not have to take over as ambassador to China. He would have no formal position beyond special representative of the president. He could do what needed to be done and then come home, postponing his freedom only briefly. After lunch, Truman walked to the Red Room and placed a call to Leesburg.

  Marshall would go, as Truman knew, as everyone knew. That was the kind of man he was.

  The frequent comparisons to George Washington were not just hyperbole or platitude. As a boy, Marshall had been fixated on the first president; near Marshall’s hometown in western Pennsylvania was a fort—Fort Necessity—that Washington had once tried, and failed, to defend. And there was much about Marshall as a man that seemed modeled on the first great American soldier-statesman. There was the same reserve; the proud and somewhat stiff, thoroughly military bearing; the manner both understated and imposing. There was the renown not so much for brilliance of insight as quality of judgment. There was also the temper, which flared in displays all the more fearsome for their rarity.

  There was the same reluctance when it came to power—a cultivated impression, but acted on enough, in meaningful enough ways, that it could not be dismissed as posturing or false modesty. Marshall was suited to wielding power, but hesitant when it came to seeking it.

  During World War II, there was broad agreement that the most glorious act of generalship, command of the D-Day invasion of Europe, should by all rights go to Marshall. He had built the Allied war machine, he should lead it to victory. “Ike,” President Roosevelt said to Eisenhower, whom Marshall had picked out as a one-star and promoted above hundreds of officers, “you and I know who was Chief of Staff during the last years of the Civil War but practically no one else knows, although the names of the field generals . . . every schoolboy knows them. I hate to think that 50 years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was.” Roosevelt thought that would change only if Marshall was allowed to step down as army chief of staff to lead the cross-channel invasion. But the president had come to rely too much on Marshall for his continual counsel, his command over the war effort, his grasp of global strategy and authority at the high table of alliance diplomacy. If Marshall went off to Europe, Roosevelt would lose all that. Marshall, for his part, did not so much as voice a preference, though it was not hard to sense what he wanted. He became “upset and shy” when pressed, Stimson recorded in his diary. “I had begged him not to sacrifice what I considered the interests of the country to the undue sensitiveness of his own conscience in seeming to seek a post.” Marshall did not listen. Ultimately, Roosevelt concluded, “I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.” Eisenhower got the D-Day command instead, and with it the attendant glory.

  Marshall was the sort of man who sent those around him into raptures. They spoke of his presence, “a striking and communicated force” felt as soon as he entered a room. It “compelled respect” and “spread a sense of authority and calm,” yet still conveyed “abject humility.” They marveled at his aura of command, above all self-command, and his capacity for decision, for decisiveness. “Don’t fight the problem, decide it,” he would tell them. “To say what makes greatness in a man is very difficult,” Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state, wrote Marshall. “But when one is close to it one knows.”

  To those who knew him well, Marshall’s steel-country stoicism came with an overlay of southern charm. It was the product of lineage, on both sides, and education at the Virginia Military Institute. They saw warmth in the blue eyes that at first seemed piercingly cold. But even to those who knew him very well, he was almost always General, never George. Even Roosevelt would call him General to his face, George only behind his back. When the blithe president slipped, Marshall objected. “I distrust this first-name business,” he said. “I have no feelings,” he liked to say, “except those I reserve for Mrs. Marshall.”

  In the first years of World War II, this steely image had become famous—and for some, infamous. When Marshall took command of the army, the officer corps was populated by time-servers. He set about clearing the “dead wood” with meritocratic ruthlessness. “Those who stand up under punishment will be pushed ahead,” he said. “Those who fail are out at the first sign of faltering.” He was said to carry a little black book to keep track, but it was in fact just his exceptional memory; names captured by it, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Ridgway, became known to the entire country. With the others, Marshall heard from wives that he had “ruined” their husbands. He could see the toll—“I had to relieve him, and I am afraid I broke his heart”—but the ruthlessness was essential. Defending it before Congress, seemingly every member irate over a favored officer felled in the killing spree, he argued, “You give a good leader very little and he will succeed. You give a mediocrity a great deal and he will fail.”

  “Modern warfare has little of drama and romance,” Marshall had observed when he
was younger. “It becomes more and more a proposition of horrible possibilities, with an extremely complicated approach in each instance.” He obsessed over means, over the complicated approach, while fellow officers held forth on ends and left it for others to figure out the details. He hated it when someone agreed with a proposal in principle, or urged an objective while offering nothing about how to get there. If you had nothing to say about the means, how could you be sure you believed in an end? Success in reaching it hinged less on flashy stratagems or gutsy maneuvers than on more prosaic matters—the training of troops, the coordination of officers, the efficiency of supply lines.

  If anything matched the importance of leadership for Marshall, it was this last element, logistics. He had risen through a career consumed with the mundane concerns of headquarters, his reputation made less by battlefield heroics than by bureaucratic foresight and finesse. He was such an ideal staff officer, such a “brilliant planner,” that his D-Day disappointment was just the last in a string of failures to escape to the combat command he craved. In the first world war, stationed in France, he organized the great American offensives, an “appalling proposition”—getting 600,000 men and almost 3,000 heavy weapons from one front to another, on overcrowded bad roads with names he could not pronounce, keeping them supplied with ammunition and blankets, trucks fueled, horses and infantrymen fed and healthy, all on no sleep. In the second world war, leading the American Army, he spent much of his time worrying about aluminum and antifreeze and netting to protect airmen from malarial mosquitoes, all to be distributed over 59,000 miles of supply routes he had to protect from enemy attack. He started one early memo to Roosevelt with the unglamorous declaration, “The future effort of the Army is dependent upon shipping.” Without boats to resupply them, it did not matter how gallant the men or skilled the commanders. The liberation of Europe was at one point stalled because Patton’s tanks ran out of gas.

  Others at first complained about this tedious fixation. “The destinies of two great empires seem to be tied up in some goddamn things called LSTs,” Churchill barked, when told a strategy was unworkable because of a shortage of amphibious landing craft. But he came to see Marshall was right: without logistics, strategy was fantasy. When eventually Churchill called Marshall “the true ‘organizer of victory,’ ” the formulation—the organizer—was meant not as faint praise. Marshall had taken a gentlemanly army of 200,000 and built it into a war machine of more than 8 million. He had produced 2.5 million jeeps and trucks, 88,000 tanks, 12.6 million rifles, 2 million machine guns, 129,000 combat planes. The single-paragraph citation that Marshall received at his retirement ceremony included the sentence: “It was he who first recognized that victory in a global war would depend on this Nation’s capacity to ring the earth with far-flung supply lines.”

  And it was not just in this regard that men like the aristocratic Churchill—or the hyper-verbal, always-at-ease, to-the-manor-born Roosevelt—came to realize they had underestimated Marshall. In look and manner, he seemed the plain-spoken military man: the straight-backed six-foot frame; the rugged face (though with an incongruously weak chin); the precise speech and no-nonsense syntax; the briefs on production and transport amid lofty discussion of grand strategy and the future of empires. They could take this general’s measure at a glance and know what they were getting.

  Marshall surpassed every judgment in little time. Roosevelt observed that he had emerged as “the best man at the conference table.” Churchill, not easily impressed, conceded that “he has a massive brain.” (This even though Marshall exploded at Churchill in an argument, “Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned beach,” prompting Roosevelt to speculate, “I think Winston is beginning not to like George Marshall very much.”) Marshall had lived up to advice he once gave Eisenhower: “Persuade by accomplishment rather than eloquence.”

  The effects of such persuasion were public as well as private. One of Marshall’s aides fretted near the end of World War II, “It will take history a long time to find out how much he has done and is doing because of his continuing modesty.” In fact, the public celebration was far from modest. A reporter wrote that Marshall had “the memory of an unnatural genius, and the integrity of a Christian saint.” In another unlikely formulation, he was a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. His final official report on the war spent twelve weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt’s Republican challenger in 1944, promised on the campaign trail that he would keep Marshall in place, despite rumors that Marshall himself would run for president in the next election. “The Democratic Party owes it to the people to draft General Marshall for President,” one senator proclaimed. To such suggestions Marshall would reply, “I have never voted, my father was a Democrat, my mother a Republican, and I am an Episcopalian.”

  When the war was over, for the three months between V-J Day and his retirement, Marshall had taken on a new preoccupation. He worried that Americans were prone to being careless in peace and thus reckless in war. “The hour war is declared,” as he saw it, “we take a boy out of high school and give him a couple thousand men.” He had seen what happened when his country withdrew from the world in the 1920s and 1930s. It could not make the same complacent peacetime mistakes again, not with the new burdens that history, in the aftermath of this last war, had laid upon it. No longer could it rest secure behind two oceans and rely on nations far away to keep threats from its shores. The world had changed, and “we are now,” Marshall said, “concerned with the peace of the entire world.” He exhorted in his valedictory remarks, “We must not waste the victory.”

  Over the course of the war, his hair had gone from auburn to gray. His face had become lined, a look of determination set in place. The six years, Katherine wrote, “had taken a terrific toll.”

  Every day, he had read the casualty lists—“a constant stream, a steady stream, and I can’t get away from them.” He had compiled them in graphic reports for the White House, vividly designed in color, so the president could not get away from them either. Four hundred thousand Americans, many friends or the children of friends, had died under his charge. Katherine’s son Allen, his stepson, had been shot by a sniper during an Allied campaign in Italy that Marshall had thought ill conceived; when he visited Allen’s grave, was it clear he had done all he could to avert it? “I loathe war,” Marshall said. “I have finished my military career, but I feel that I must do my best to have us avoid a tragic repetition of our past neglect, our past failures.”

  As chief of staff, Marshall insisted that his commanders rest before a new mission. But on November 28, the day after getting the president’s call about China, he was in the Oval Office by 10:30 a.m. With Katherine the night before, he told Truman, there was “the devil to pay.”

  The relationship between these two men had grown from an unpromising beginning. As a senator, Truman made his name heading up the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program—to investigate, in other words, impropriety and ineptitude in the mobilization Marshall was leading. Then, when Truman tried to enlist in the army, Marshall told him he was too old. Yet both had watched proud fathers fall on hard times. Both had wanted to go to West Point but found it out of reach. Both were seen as men of an earlier age, nineteenth-century men, in their own ways. By the time Vice President Truman learned of his sudden ascension to the presidency in April 1945—“Boys, if you ever pray for me, pray for me now”—the fact that Marshall would be at his side was a badly needed comfort. Truman had been granted just two one-on-one meetings with Roosevelt. He knew little of the inner workings of U.S. strategy—nothing of the secret weapon being built in New Mexico or the secret agreements struck at Yalta to bring Stalin into the war against Japan. Marshall was unsettled by the hold he seemed to have on the new president.

  For Truman, just a few months after V-J Day, the burdens of peacetime seemed no less trying than those of wartime. He took to saying that Sherman had it wrong: “Peace
is hell.”

  Now Truman’s most pressing problems were those at home. Americans recalled the stagnation that followed World War I, and the Great Depression was a fresh memory—a nightmare that ended only with the military buildup a few years before. There was panic about the threat of mass unemployment, about inflation, about strikes by autoworkers, steelworkers, and packinghouse workers. There was a shortage of meat and a call to cut wheat consumption in half. It was, Truman said, a “time of great emergency.” Amid all that, few Americans saw events abroad as their foremost concern; victory should entitle them to focus on their own problems for a while, and as one official put it, to “go to the movies and drink Coke.” In a survey, only 7 percent said that securing the peace was the most important issue at hand, a fraction of those who picked jobs, reconversion of the economy, and labor unrest. (More than two-thirds also said they did not believe that Hitler was really dead.)

  But whatever the worries of his voters, Truman, like Marshall, knew that much of the world was in ruins. It fell to the United States—with its homeland all but unscathed, more than one-third of global economic activity within its borders, two-thirds of all gold reserves in its hands—to help restore this world. “We have virtually been elected by the acclamation of the harassed and suffering people of the world to the leadership of the greatest and most beneficent movement in world history for the good of mankind,” Marshall had told an audience in Kansas City the week before. And to make things more complicated, there was growing concern about what Stalin was after in this ruined world. The extension of the wartime alliance into the postwar era, Roosevelt’s vision, seemed ever more fraught.