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By Root 872 0

may say that when I first opened relations with the Pentagon I dutifully applied for clearance as I was told to do, had myself fingerprinted, and filled out a questionnaire as long as a Chinese scroll painting—two, in fact: one for the Department of Defense and one for the State Department, though I can’t say I was happy with the thought that I would have to submit notes on classified material, and the finished manuscript, for official sanction. The more I thought about it, the less the prospect pleased. In the meantime, while the bureaucratic mills were grinding, I was working on the Stilwell papers in the family home at Carmel and in the Hoover Library, where Stilwell’s World War II papers were deposited. At some point after Hoover acquired them, the Army got to thinking about it, and had gone through the deposit and removed the more “sensitive” (if that’s the word) of the classified reports, helpfully leaving a blank sheet of white paper in each place as mute token of its passage. This was not as frustrating as might be supposed, since I discovered that duplicates of the removed material remained in the Carmel files. With access to the Stilwell archive and other private collections, and with the amazingly thorough research and documentation by my predecessors, Riley Sunderland and Charles F. Romanus in the military and Herbert Feis in the diplomatic field, and with the publication of the Foreign Relations volumes on China through 1944, what did I need clearance for?

A lawyer who had been consulted on another matter relating to the book was emphatically opposed to my using any clearance that would require submission of the manuscript. By this time, six months after application, owing either to the murkiness of my past or to bureaucratic torpor (I am not sure which), the clearance had not yet come through. The question was, how does one stop a process even if it is not producing anything? The lawyer advised that I simply write to the Adjutant General and ask that my request be canceled on the grounds that I no longer needed it, which was accordingly done, taking a load off my mind. Subsequently, whenever I came across reference to a document I wanted to see for myself, I would write to the very obliging people in the Military Division here at the Archives or at OCMH, and ask if such-and-such a document could be declassified. In all except one instance, I think, it could. In some cases, for example the episode of Colonel McHugh’s intervention through Secretary Knox to have Stilwell recalled that so enraged General Marshall, I was able to establish the facts through the simple expedient of going to the private source, in this case the McHugh papers at Cornell, where the top-secret letter to Knox is quietly and innocently—and openly—resting. So much for clearance; it is overrated.

As to not making a tape-recording of my interviews with participants, I can only say that a machine makes me quail. This may have something to do with being female. A woman is accustomed to entering upon a conversation as a personal thing, even with a stranger—perhaps more so with a stranger—and I can’t imagine myself plunking a machine down in front of someone and saying, “Now, talk.” Besides, I am quite certain I would not know how to make it work. So I took along a notebook instead, one that fitted into my pocketbook and so was always handy for planned or unplanned need. The loose-leaf pages, being the same size as my index cards, could be filed conveniently along with the other research material.

Interviews, of course, proved some of my most useful sources, but I have told all about that in a speech to the Oral History conference two years ago, and as I have a horror of old speeches, I won’t repeat it here. There is one aspect, however, which I was uneasily aware of all along but more acutely since publication, and that is all the associates of Stilwell whom I did not talk to. I have now had innumerable letters from CBI (China-Burma-India) veterans and old China hands, some with anecdotes or phrases or bits and pieces of information which