Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS END By William Henry Chamberlin Billions for Defense & Real Allies-Not a Cent for Unfriendly Neutrals Former President Truman includes in his memoirs a memorandum from Averell...
...For all practical purposes, the Administration interned an army of several hundred thousand anti-Communist Chinese which could have been most usefully employed in probing raids on the Chinese coast...
...Personally...
...But on other occasions he and his trusted advisers acted as if their hearts were not in the struggle...
...not a cent for unfriendly neutrals...
...Undue deference was paid to the views of Prime Minister Nehru of India, whose contribution to the struggle consisted of an ambulance unit, some jute bags and a great deal of backseat-driving, all in the direction of appeasement and defeatism...
...A willing fighting ally, Chiang Kai-shek, was refused an opportunity to participate in the struggle, either by sending troops to Korea or by landing on the South China coast...
...The casual reader of some dispatches by Walter Lippmann and Joseph Harsch at that time might have wondered why we were not sending Marines to throw out Chiang Kai-shek and hold the island in a UN trust for eventual take-over by the Communists...
...The latest manifestation of half-heartedness in the cold war is a tendency to exalt India's role in world affairs and to suggest that Nehru should be handsomely paid by us for his consistent role as an unfriendly neutral...
...Yet, this idea seemed "strange" to Harriman...
...An old American slogan might be profitably revived and revised as a guide to foreign policy: "Billions for defense, and for genuine allies...
...He made the right decision when he used American forces to save South Korea...
...Typical is a recent comment by Harsch in the Christian Science Monitor: "India has an effect upon those who stay long in it and with its leaders...
...MacArthur, Harriman writes, "has a strange idea that we should back anybody who will fight Communism...
...Manchuria and the Chinese mainland were declared off bounds to American air attack and Chinese Nationalist raids...
...What was most inconsistent in Truman's Asian policy was the deliberate exclusion of Nationalist China from the struggle...
...Red China was permitted to gain the enormous prestige of having successfully invaded Korea and driven back a UN army hundreds of miles...
...WHERE the NEWS END By William Henry Chamberlin Billions for Defense & Real Allies-Not a Cent for Unfriendly Neutrals Former President Truman includes in his memoirs a memorandum from Averell Harriman about conversations with General MacArthur after the outbreak of the Korean War...
...I feel that Syngman Rhee...
...whatever some of his faults (especially in his attitude toward Japan), is far more worth cultivating as a friend than Nehru or any other "uncommitted" neutralist...
...The chance for winning the smashing victory that would have ended the Red Chinese threat for a long time, perhaps for a generation, was muffed...
...I happen to know one experienced U.S...
...President Truman clearly designated imperialist Communism as an enemy to be fought when he urged military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey...
...General Ridgway's recent description of 80-year-old Rhee flying in sub-zero weather to the broken front in Korea and rallying his green troops with fiery exhortations is something to remember...
...Before and during the Korean War, there was this halfhearted, ambivalent attitude...
...diplomat who came away from India with very different feelings and who privately refers to Nehru as America's Public Enemy Number 3. after Moscow and Peking...
...The United States deliberately abstained from the full use of its air-naval power and its most modern weapons...
...They come away with something close to a feeling that India, more than any one other country, is the keeper of the conscience of the world...
...When the supreme challenge came, with the mass invasion of Korea by Red Chinese troops, the Administration lost nerve...
...That this idea should appear strange spotlights what has been wrong with our foreign policy even after 1947...
...If mainland China had been a friendly power, we could hardly have been more solicitous about protecting its security...
...The same strange idea that Nationalist China could be kicked in the teeth, without damage to American national interest, was expressed by several commentators when the Nationalist Government vetoed the admission of Soviet Outer Mongolia to the UN...
...In view of the monolithic solidarity of the Communist bloc, what could be more natural than to give all possible support to any nation, group or man sincerely committed to struggle against Communism...
...As a consequence, the United States faces the difficult task of holding a line against Communist expansion in Asia with a weak and wavering group of peripheral states...
Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 10
