The Wrong Turn

...There were three groups, Colegrove said: the "pro-Communist," the "pro-American," and the "in-betweens...

...I had read it before but in the light of current calls for a "blue ribbon commission" to make a "major reassessment" of our China policy, I decided to take a fresh look...

...Oh, Senator, I don't know whether he pays dues or not," McCarthy replied...

...It was the same old crowd," commented Senator James O. Eastland, "that betrayed China and sold her down the river...

...The peasant, for instance, is there to be organized...

...If we have a basic policy of opposition to the Communist advance, and opposition to the Communist consolidation of Asia...

...It was a rewarding two hours—the 1949 document makes fascinating, and melancholy, reading...

...A big campaign was under way, led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, to prevent Senate confirmation of Ambassador Jessup as a member of the U. S. delegation to the 1951 U. N. General Assembly...

...I would not agree at all that we are so-called 'washed-up in China,'" declared Professor Colegrove, "and neither that the Nationalist government is washed up...

...What did they mean for world order and peace...

...A Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee was slated to hold public hearings on the Jessup nomination...

...Stassen's subsequent appearance before the Foreign Relations group was an anti-climactic effort to soften this impeachment...

...The United States had to formulate "a new policy...

...It should be "high American policy" to forestall "Russian consolidation of Asia...

...The fate of the views of that round-table, as recorded in the document, constitutes an object lesson in what happens to a nation when it turns hysterically inward and the advocates of the reality principle in foreign affairs are denounced as "tools of appeasement and accommodation...

...One of the most interesting exchanges, however, took place over the issue of recognition of Communist China...

...General George C. Marshall, then head of the American Red Cross, and a roundtable participant, stressed the issue of "timing...

...It seems to me that if the economy worsens, that this will arouse opposition to it, and as I see it, the opposition is essential if new leadership is to develop in China...

...In assessing these views of Stassen it is worth remembering that at the time he represented the liberal, internationalist wing of the Republican Party...

...One of the items in McCarthy's indictment of Jessup was that, along with Abe Fortas, now on the U. S. Supreme Court, he had been listed as an adviser of the Yale branch of the American Law Students Association...

...He advocated a policy of "watchful waiting" rather than "unchangeable hostility" toward a Communist-dominated China...

...He said, in effect, 'What the hell do you think we can give to China?' He [Stalin] said, 'We have a hundred cities of our own to build in the Soviet Far East...

...I say it should be firm and clear: If you are under Communist dominance, you don't qualify for American generosity and if you break with Communism, then there will be American generosity...

...It was Kennan's overall judgment that the Russians were "perhaps the people least able to combine with the Chinese in developing the resources of China and producing anything which in a physical sense would be dangerous to us...

...One exchange between McCarthy and Senator J. W. Fulbright, who could not conceal his loathing for the Wisconsin demagogue, recalls vividly the hysteria that gripped the nation at the time...

...Professor Edwin O. Reischauer of Harvard favored recognition in principle but cautioned against "unseemly haste...

...Most of the conferees, however, did not accept Stassen's analysis...

...Professor Arthur N. Holcombe of Harvard doubted that the Kremlin would find the new regime in Peking "an altogether reliable instrument for its own purposes...

...The conference was held at the State Department over a three-day period at the beginning of October, 1949...

...The U. S. Ambassador to China when Nanking fell, Dr...

...tensions They warned that to interpret Asian developments in terms of America's preoccupation with anti-Communism was to risk a serious misunderstanding of the forces at work...

...Lattimore, who subsequently was almost hounded out of the country for alleged Communist sympathies, cautioned that "over-haste in recognizing the new situation might indicate panic...

...The main attack against Jessup before the Foreign Relations panel was led by Senator McCarthy, who charged the Ambassador with an alleged "affinity" for Communist causes...

...In my judgment Asia is Number One on Russia's board," he declared...

...Most of the conferees, however, felt that trade with China afforded the most promising approach not only to a friendly relationship with this vast new power in the world, but to weaning Peking away from Moscow...

...The Wrong Turn by JOSEPH LASH In the course of cleaning out my desk at The New York Post recently I came across the transcript of a hush-hush State Department roundtable on "American Policy Toward China" that was held in 1949...

...The pro-Americans, said Colegrove, were captained by Stassen and included Joseph W. Ballantine of Brookings Institution, Professor Bernard Brodie of Yale, and Professor Claude A. Buss of the Army War College...

...He got the "impression," Colegrove suavely observed, that the State Department had already made up its mind to recognize Red China and convoked the conference because it wanted "someone to back them up...

...The conferees were told, in effect, that they had "a blank sheet of paper, a white page on which the future is to be written...

...Not only were the Communists taking power in the most populous nation in the world but the Soviet Union had just exploded its first atomic device...

...Chiang Kai-shek still merited our support, he argued, and "our policy in China should be the same sort of policy [as] in Europe, viz., to resist totalitarian regimes which carry on aggressions very much like the aggressions which Hitler carried on at the beginning of the World War...

...If anybody is going to give anything to the Far East, I think it's you...

...He did not ordinarily like a "negative approach," but trade with China should be severely restricted...

...The secret meeting brought together U. S. bankers, businessmen, missionary leaders, scholars, diplomats, and soldiers—all, or almost all, "old China hands...

...He believed that "the Chinese have very, very strong capabilities of Titoism because I think they are very nationalistic and very much nurtured their independence...

...how wrong the minority whose views unfortunately became national policy...

...There seemed to be general agreement with the view of William R. Herod of International General Electric that "we should not recognize today," while the civil war was still going on, but that preparations should be made for recognition when Communist control over the machinery of state was clearly evident...

...The Department, then headed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, hoped to get some help from the blue ribbon group...

...Thus Professor Colegrove gave this description of alignments at the conference to the Internal Senate Security subcommittee in 1951 when it was in full cry after Ambassador Jessup...

...Kennan thought Stalin was speaking "quite sincerely...

...Colonel McCann of Military Intelligence informed the conference that "the life expectancy of organized Nationalist military resistance in China is extremely short...

...A major factor, of course, was Red China's move into Korea when General MacArthur sent the U. N. armies up to the Yalu River...

...There were few who thought a pact modeled on NATO ought to be promoted in the Far East and almost no one who thought it was practicable...

...exclaimed Senator Fulbright coldly, when McCarthy injected Fortas's name...

...The concrete issues on which the State Department sought advice and counsel were: Whether and when the United States should recognize the new regime in Peking...

...One Department official described the roundtable as "the greatest aggregation of intelligent thinkers that there is in this country on this subject...

...Others in this group, according to Colegrove, were Professor Fairbank, Professor Reischauer, later to be chosen by President Kennedy as Ambassador to Japan, Professors Rupert Emerson and Eugene Staley, head of the World Affairs Council of Northern California...

...I remember Stalin one time snorting rather contemptuously and vigorously," Kennan reported, "because one of our people asked them what they were going to give China when this war was over...

...we should play out every card of opposition...

...That invasion gave the China Lobby and the demagogues their chance...

...Colegrove's dubious performance was exceeded only by Stassen's...

...He has written for Harper's and The New Republic and is the author of "Dag Hammarskjold —Custodian of the Brushfire Peace" and "Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend's Memoir...

...How were the sound views expressed by the majority at these meetings almost overnight transformed into unspeakable thoughts...

...This gives a picture in bare outline of the lineup at the roundtable on the major issues...

...That, of course, means that it would be unthinkable to recognize the Communist government in China and to withdraw recognition from the Nationalist government...

...Red China's military forces might be the factor to tip a Kremlin decision in favor of war, he went on...

...whether we should promote a "Pacific pact" that would contain Red China as NATO had been designed to halt Soviet expansionism in Europe...

...Our problem is to ally ourselves with the forces of the future in Asia," said Professor John K. Fairbank of Harvard...

...Stassen claimed that he had remonstrated with Jessup about the pro-Communist theories of the "Lattimore group" but that Jessup had insisted "there is more logic in their views...

...John D. Rockefeller III agreed...

...Is he a Communist...

...Walter W. Stuart, on the basis of his long experience there, predicted that Communism in China "will be something that is distinctively Chinese...

...A three-man departmental panel headed by Ambassador Philip C. Jessup was reviewing U. S. policy in Asia...

...One might be called a "containment" vow, the other a "co-existence" approach...

...J. Morden Murphy, a Bankers Trust Company executive and a former head of Air Force Intelligence in China, thought it a "very unsound assumption" that "Russian influence would automatically predominate in China...

...JOSEPH P. LASH recently left The New York Post, where he has been assistant editorial page editor, to write a definitive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt for the New American Library...

...Jessup was confirmed, but it would be a long time before scholars and diplomats would again be willing to express themselves on China policy with the realism and candor of 1949...

...Unhappily, they were aided and abetted by some of the participants in the roundtable, who helped the McCarthyites convert the transcript of that October, 1949 discussion into a heretical, almost treasonable document...

...How right the majority of participants in the 1949 roundtable—and the State Department—proved to be...

...The conference largely divided over two main approaches to these developments...

...A group headed by Harold Stassen, then president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Professor Kenneth Colegrove of Northwestern University, envisaged Mao's victory as an extension of the monolithic power of Stalin and the Kremlin...

...I do not agree," countered Stassen, "that any softness toward the Communists of China will give a better prospect of Titoism developing...

...We have come to the end of an era" in the Far East, were the words with which the Department opened the conference...

...The end of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist resistance to Mao's Communist advance was in sight...

...The United States had to take account of "nationalist political feelings," he added, and not simply make an ideological evaluation...

...Obsessed with the Communist danger, they construed the Chinese revolution as another instance of Communist aggression and not as a manifestation primarily of nationalism and the yearning for social reform...

...What did these developments mean for American security?, the conferees asked themselves...

...revolution is there to be led, and our problem is to relate ourselves to these movements...

...A few days before the subcommittee was to hear Stassen, he hurried before the Senate Internal Security group to charge that Jessup had sided with the Lattimore group at the now famous roundtable conference...

...He asserted that Lattimore headed those who were "sympathetic to Communist China...

...It seems to me that the fastest way to contain Communism is to discredit it in the eyes of the people of China...

...Speaker after speaker cautioned that there was a revolution in progress in Asia and that revolution was not "coeval," as a State Department expert put it, with U.S.-U.S.S.R...

...That did not daunt Stassen...

...The U. S. government did not share Colegrove's assessment of the survival capacity of Nationalist armies...

...He urged that Chinese recognition be made part of a larger package so that we could do some tough overall bargaining...

...George Kennan, who was then head of the State Department's Plans and Policies Division, provided the group with some intriguing information on why the economic suit might be the strongest hand the United States could play...

...The fall of 1949 was a major turning point in world affairs...

...Meanwhile, the United States embarked on a policy of isolating, containing, and outlawing Communist China—a policy for which we are paying a staggering price today...

...whether trade should be permitted between the United States and Red China, and between Japan and Red China...

...The era had begun in which the world had to learn to live with the bomb and the constant threat of holocaust...

...Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins agreed with him that "timing is all important...