The China Mission by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

Author:Daniel Kurtz-Phelan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

“I am sure that you realize that the enclosed letter contains criticism of certain individuals responsible for U.S. policy in the Far East,” read a note that reached Chiang in August. The enclosed letter pronounced Marshall’s approach “unsound” and endorsed the advice that Chiang was getting from hard-line advisers: “air and ground forces should be disposed so that they can quickly and effectively suppress or annihilate Communist agitators and their armed forces.”

What was notable was the letter’s author: would-be ambassador Wedemeyer. Back stateside, his hopes of quickly returning to China dashed, he was spreading the word about Chiang’s cause. The reaction in key quarters, he related, was encouraging.

Wedemeyer’s griping about the canceled appointment had gone beyond the odd comment to reporters around Washington. Almost as soon as he had finished assuring Marshall that he bore no resentment—“whatever you advise in this regard I shall accept as gospel”—Wedemeyer rushed to peddle a different message. Before long, he was writing Patrick Hurley, Marshall’s predecessor as envoy, to complain about Marshall’s folly. He was asking the Chinese embassy for help with public speaking. He was complaining that “Marshall’s own statements concerning China are taken as equivalent to Bible texts by the U.S. people.” He was claiming, to Chiang and around Washington, that “so long as our policy remains unrealistic, I want no part of the job in China.” Ignoring his own indiscretion, he blamed traitorous State Department officials for the leaks about his presumed appointment.

Wedemeyer understood the changing American mood, and placed emphasis accordingly. “Exactly what happened to cause Dr. Stuart to be appointed,” he wrote suggestively to one Nationalist official, “I am not at liberty to state but I feel certain that you surmise.” Soon even that much restraint was gone: “Apparently there was opposition to my return on the part of certain individuals who knew that I would not tolerate half way measures in dealing with the Communist situation.” If such appeasement continued, he took to warning, “all of Asia in less than a generation will come under Soviet domination by means short of war.”

Wedemeyer had always concealed an element of perfidy beneath a surface of polished assurance. He had earned Marshall’s regard by brilliance as a planner and tactician in the opening stretch of World War II. Even then, however, he held the America First view that the United States had been tricked into World War I and counted the pilot-turned-arch-isolationist Charles Lindbergh as a close friend. Before that, Wedemeyer had been posted to Nazi Germany and come away persuaded that “however much one disapproved of Hitler’s methods, the feeling of the German people that he had raised them out of the abyss was real.” After the war, he remained fixated on the dangerous influence of Jews, especially in the “money-making areas”—part of a “planned penetration by certain exponents of contrary ideologies.”

By the time Marshall got around to sending a note of apology about the ambassadorial role, Wedemeyer’s whisper campaign was already under way. “I am so sorry,” Marshall wrote. “Altogether you have been made to suffer too much by my actions and I regret it very much.

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