Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [115]
In making his choice the President undoubtedly believed or was persuaded by Hurley that it would compel the Communists to accept Chiang’s terms for coalition. But it was only possible to believe this by rejecting the Embassy’s appraisal of the seriousness and the dynamism of the Communist challenge. The choice was the last important decision of Roosevelt’s life. A few days later he left for Warm Springs, where he died.
In March when the President made this decision, Mao and Chou in conversations with Service were still emphasizing and amplifying their desire for cooperation and friendship with the United States. The rebuff suffered by the lack of any reply to their offer to go to Washington was never mentioned (doubtless because they wished to keep it secret) and in fact none of the political officers attached to the Dixie Mission knew anything about it. Supported by Chu Teh, Liu Shao-ch’i, and other leaders of the Party, Mao and Chou returned repeatedly to the theme that China and the United States complemented each other economically—in China’s need for post-war economic development and America’s ability to assist and participate in it. Trying to assess how far this represented genuine conviction, Service concluded that Mao was certainly sincere in hoping to avoid an exclusive dependence on the Soviet Union.
The banishment shortly afterward of Service and the others concerned in the Atcheson telegram was a signal to the Communists of the American choice. In reaction their first overt signs of hostility appeared in the form of articles by Mao in the Communist press. Confined so far to attacks on the “Hurley policy,” these seemed still to retain hope of a change by Roosevelt’s successor. In his speech to the Seventh Party Congress in June, Mao seemed to be half warning, half pleading. If the pro-Chiang choice by “a group of people in the U.S. government” were to prevail, he said, it would drag the American government “into the deep stinking cesspool of Chinese reaction” and “place a crushing burden on the government and people of the United States and plunge them into endless woes and troubles.”
After V-J Day American forces enabled the Nationalists, who had neither the means nor the plans ready for the occasion, to take the Japanese surrender on the mainland and regain the occupied cities. The United States moved its marine forces into the important northern cities and ports (Tientsin, Tsingtao, Peking, Chingwangtao) to deny these centers and the railroads in the area to the Communists until Chiang’s troops, ferried by American ship and planes, could get there. This constituted clear intervention to the Communists since their own forces would otherwise have reoccupied the north. Though justified by us under the pressing necessity of disarming the Japanese, our action was a logical development of the decision to sustain Chiang, and was taken as such by the Communists. Confirmed, as they saw it, by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s discrimination against Communist areas and by American toleration of Japanese troops serving with the Nationalists, they took the turn toward antagonism which in the course of the next four years was to become definitive.
Through 1945 efforts for coalition, mediated by Hurley, continued—largely because neither side wished to appear to have chosen the course of civil war—but they were empty of intent. Failing to move either side any closer to the unity he had so often and so confidently promised, Hurley grew increasingly erratic and disturbed and suddenly resigned in November 1945 with a famous blast, the first salvo of McCarthyism. His mission had been thwarted, he claimed, by a section of the State Department which was “endeavoring to support Communism generally as well as specifically in China.” He could not admit, and perhaps never understood, that his own estimate of the situation had been inadequate and the current of Chinese