Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [114]
What of the receiving end? The Communist request reached Roosevelt in terms already condemned by his Ambassador. It reached him, moreover, when he was plunged into preparations for the Yalta conference and overwhelmed by the dismaying problems of approaching victory. (Hurley’s second, fuller telegram arrived after the President had already left Washington for Yalta.) War crimes, the post-war treatment of Germany, the Soviet claim to sixteen seats in the United Nations, the Polish border, the arrest of Badoglio, trouble in Yugoslavia and Greece, the fall of the Iranian government, not to mention the necessity, according to Secretary Stettinius, of a “private talk with Mr. Churchill on British meat purchases in Argentina”—all these in the thirteenth year of a crisis-filled Presidency did not leave Roosevelt eager to precipitate a new crisis with the unmanageable Chiang Kaishek.
Bewildered by the intractability of China, disenchanted with the Generalissimo but fearful of the troubles that would rush in if the United States relaxed support, Roosevelt was inclined to look for a solution in the coming conference with Russia. His hope was to secure Stalin’s agreement to support the Nationalist government, thus giving the Chinese Communists no choice but unity. He succeeded in obtaining the desired agreement at Yalta, and returned to be confronted by a choice in our China policy. Tired, ill, and in the last month of life, he made a decision that closed this episode.
Coalition having reached another deadlock, Hurley and Wedemeyer arrived in Washington in March 1945 for consultation. Choosing their presence there as the opportunity to bring to a head the issue in American policy, all the political officers of the Embassy in Chungking, led by the chargé d’affairs, George Atcheson, joined in an unprecedented action. With the concurrence and “strong approval” of Wedemeyer’s chief of staff, they addressed a long telegram to the Department, in effect condemning the Ambassador’s policy. It pointed out that the Communists represented a force in China that was on the rise, that it was “dangerous to American interests from the long-range point of view” to be precluded from dealing with them, that with the approach of a landing in China the time was short before we would have to decide whether to cooperate with them or not. They recommended therefore “that the President inform the Generalissimo in definite terms that military necessity requires that we supply and cooperate with the Communists,” and that such decision “will not be delayed or contingent upon” coalition.
After precipitating the explosive reaction of Hurley, who could see only an “act of disloyalty” to himself, the telegram was submitted to the President with the Department’s recommendation that it provided an opportunity to re-examine the whole situation and “in particular” the possibility of “giving war supplies to the Chinese Communists as well as to Chiang Kai-shek.” The President discussed it in two conversations with Hurley on March 8 and 24, with no officer of the State Department recorded as present on either occasion. Hurley evidently argued convincingly that the Russian agreement secured by the President at Yalta would sufficiently weaken the Communists so that he could promise unity in China by “the end of April,” as he had already told the Department. Roosevelt, clinging to the goal he had started with and ever the optimist, decided in favor of Hurley’s policy of dealing exclusively with the Generalissimo and of making no connection with the Communists without his consent. In effect, this rejected the recommendation of the Embassy staff and left the conduct of American policy to the tyro Ambassador. Thus confirmed, Hurley was able to insist on his requirement that Atcheson and his colleagues involved in the Embassy telegram, five out of six of them Chinese-speaking