Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [117]
Hurley started his mission with his mind equally set against the Foreign Service. When he came to blame it for his troubles, he accused it alternately of conspiring to support communism and of sucking the United States into a power bloc “on the side of colonial imperialism.” In this odd coupling he was not unique. Robert Sherwood, when conferring with General MacArthur’s staff in Manila, found a persecution complex at work which seemed to conceive of the War Department, the Joint Chiefs, and even the White House as under the domination of “Communists and British Imperialists.”
Finally, the weight of domestic opinion on Roosevelt must be taken into account. If the hold of Chiang Kai-shek as the archetype anti-Communist on American public opinion was such that his cause perverted American politics for a decade after the war, and if it has taken us twenty-seven years to untie the silver cord and even yet have not cut it loose, it can hardly have been easy for Roosevelt to untie it in 1945. Fear of communism lay very close beneath the skin, so close that in his final speech of the campaign of 1944 Governor Dewey, the Republican candidate, charged that Communists as a small disciplined minority, acting through Sidney Hillman, had seized control of the American Labor movement and “now … are seizing control of the New Deal through which they aim to control the Government of the United States.” Roosevelt, said this disciplined and respectable lawyer, had auctioned control of the Democratic Party to the “highest bidder”—i.e., Hillman and Earl Browder—in order to perpetuate himself in office. Through him communism would destroy liberties, religion, and private property.
If a man like Dewey could resort to the tactics of the enormous lie and to a charge as reckless as any in the history of political campaigning, Roosevelt was politician enough to know how little would be needed to revive it. The autocrat of the Time-Life empire, Henry R. Luce, was rabid on this subject, especially with reference to China; his publications were the trumpet of Chiang’s cause. Summoned to battle by Chiang’s partisans, some of them sincere and passionate advocates like the former medical missionary Congressman Walter Judd, any of the myriad enemies of the administration could create serious trouble. Roosevelt was concentrating now on the coming conference in San Francisco to organize the United Nations and on his hopes of a four-power alliance after the war to keep world peace. It was a time at all costs to avoid friction. Since China was in any case secondary to Europe—a disability it suffered from all through the war—it did not seem worth the risk that the Atcheson telegram asked him to take.
Thus passed the opportunity Mao and Chou had asked for. The factors operating against it suggest there never was an “if.” And yet there remains one strange contradictory sliver of evidence. Edgar Snow, the kind of outsider from whom Roosevelt liked to get his facts, reported a conversation with the President in March 1945 at the very time of the Hurley-Wedemeyer visit. Roosevelt was “baffled yet acutely fascinated,” Snow said, by the complexity of what was happening in China and complained that nobody explained it satisfactorily, Snow included. “He understood that our wartime aid was actually a form of intervention in China”; he “recognized the growing strength of the Chinese Communists as the effective government of the guerrilla area”; he asked “whether they were real Communists and whether the Russians were bossing them,” and asked further, “what, concretely, the Eighth Route Army could do with our aid in North China. He then said that we were going to land supplies and liaison officers on the North China coast as we drew closer to Japan.” Snow questioned whether, so long as we recognized Chiang Kai-shek as the sole government, all supplies would have to go through him. “ ‘We can