China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (26 page)

For the Communists, he wrote, “
the United States is the greatest hope and the greatest fear.” On the one hand, they “recognize that if they receive American aid [which would be their reward for making a deal with Chiang] they can quickly establish control over most if not all of China, perhaps without civil war.” This was because, in Davies’s view, once the CCP had an American imprimatur, many of Chiang’s officers and bureaucrats would desert him, and Chiang of course understood that. Correspondingly, the Communists’ greatest fear was that the United States would give aid only to Chiang, and the more aid he got, Davies wrote, “the greater the likelihood of his precipitating a civil war and the more protracted and costly will be the Communist unification of China.”

Put another way, Davies’s argument was that for either Mao or Chiang to accept the terms of the other would mean his own destruction. Both parties wanted to emerge on top in the civil conflict they both knew was coming once Japan was out of the way. Both parties also wanted to avoid appearing intransigent before Chinese and international public opinion, being the party that refused to talk and preferred civil war instead, and that common desire is what gave Hurley his opening.

And so, despite the small chance of success, the United States kept on trying to work out a deal. The effort to bring about peace in China arose from the deepest historical mission of the United States, which was to advance its commercial and strategic interests by nurturing free-enterprise, liberal-democratic values throughout the world. It was to make the world safe for democracy, as President Wilson phrased it, or, as later generations had it, to see the progress of human rights. In China in the months before and after the end of World War II, America saw the possibility of a modern liberal society rising from the ashes of its wartime devastation, and this vision exerted a powerful influence. And in fact, even though Hurley didn’t realize it, his arrival in China marked the last chance that the world’s most populous country was going to
have to forge itself into a modern, democratic state, one whose citizens enjoyed the protections and rights that it has always been the American goal to make universal.

The American scheme worked in Germany and Japan, the defeated powers, but China, with its flawed government and powerful Communist opposition, was to prove a more difficult terrain, and the smarter observers of the scene understood that. “
Hurley arrived at Yenan thinking that to bring Chiang’s Kuomintang and the Communists together was not much different from persuading Republicans and Democrats to accept bipartisanship in a time of national crisis,” Davies remarked years later. Hurley never understood Davies’s point. Arriving in Yenan, he told Barrett that he’d once settled a
bitter and highly publicized dispute between the Sinclair Oil Company and the government of Mexico, and, moreover, that he’d gotten a fee of a million dollars, and he seemed to suppose that if he could handle that negotiation successfully, he could handle the Chinese one as well. Barrett wondered if the two sides in the Mexico-Sinclair dispute weren’t a good deal more anxious to reach an agreement than the two sides in China.

Hurley was born in 1883
in what was then the Oklahoma Territory, and he’d had a hard, colorful, gritty, up-from-the-boondocks life very different from all those Ivy League easterners he would meet in his career overseas. He helped support his family by working in a coal mine in Choctaw Indian territory, starting at the age of eleven. His mother died when he was thirteen and, according to his very admiring official biographer, he continued to work delivering coal or breaking horses or taking whatever odd jobs he could find even as he read voraciously and dreamed of becoming a lawyer. He went to a newly opened night school in the town of Phillips, in Choctaw territory, while during the day he worked as a mule skinner in a coal mine (driving the animals as they carried coal out of the pits), then as a cattle herder for a local butcher. He was an outdoor kid, a friend of young Choctaws (to whom he remained loyal and sympathetic all his life), a rider of horses across the Oklahoma scrubland. He was scrappy, smart, and audacious.

In 1898 with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Hurley tried to become one of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, but he was rejected because he was only fifteen. He finished high school in a year, then attended the Indian University, the only white boy in his class at
a school created to serve Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian boys. He had many interests. He played the French horn in the school orchestra, was on the football and baseball teams, and led the school’s undefeated debate team. He graduated with a BA in 1905, worked for a while in the Indian Service in Oklahoma, and then went to Washington, D.C., where he was admitted to the National University Law School (which was later absorbed by the George Washington University School of Law). While still in law school, he went unannounced to the White House, barged his way into the president’s office, and, on the grounds that he had almost been a Rough Rider, asked him for a government job. Roosevelt, the story goes, refused on the grounds that if he had a government job, Hurley would become a lazy drunk. Better to go to Oklahoma and make something of yourself, the president told him.

Within a year, at the age of twenty-five, Hurley had his law degree. Three years later, when he was just twenty-eight, he was president of the Tulsa Bar Association.

Mostly he worked for oil companies. He made $50,000 on one case alone. In another, he was paid with a parcel of prairie territory, which was soon enveloped by the expanding city of Tulsa. He was expert in the law governing Indian territory, and that involved him in cases having to do with land claims and mineral rights. Once, in a case involving an illegal transfer of land, his opponent’s lawyer complained to the judge that Hurley was failing to stick to “the fundamental law.”

“Counsel asks for the fundamental law in this case,” Hurley replied. “It is very simple and not subject to misunderstanding. It was handed down to Moses on Mt. Sinai. It is
Thou shalt not steal.
”

Someone like Hurley was bound to get into politics, and he ran for the state senate as a Republican in a heavily Democratic district, narrowly losing. When he was a boy, one of his best friends was a quarter-blood Choctaw named Victor Locke Jr., a Republican who, despite his English-sounding name, could speak the Choctaw language and was appointed principal chief of the Choctaw Nation by President
Taft. Locke named Hurley national attorney for the 28,000-member tribe, in which post he won 115 of the 118 cases decided during his tenure, one of which saved the Oklahoma Choctaws from bankruptcy. His arguments before the courts and Congress were eloquent statements about the historical mistreatment of the Indians and both the moral and legal need for redress. In 1916, when the newly elected Democratic president
Woodrow Wilson reappointed Hurley the Choctaw national attorney,
Wilson wrote, “
Patrick Hurley is one of the few men who have held a position of trust for the Indians without using it for his personal benefit.”

Hurley served in the American expeditionary force to France in World War I, attaining the rank of colonel. After the war he became secretary of war in the Hoover administration. During 1939 and 1940, having resumed his career as an oil company lawyer, he achieved national attention in the Mexican expropriation case that he recounted to Barrett in Yenan. Mexico’s action provoked a furious, nationalistic response in the United States and an equally firm refusal on Mexico’s part to bow to American pressure. For months, as Hurley negotiated on behalf of Sinclair, the newspapers predicted that there could and would be no deal. But Hurley, fighting the nationalistic hard-liners on both sides, negotiated an agreement in which Mexico compensated Sinclair for the appropriated properties. Virtually alone among the American actors in the drama, Hurley had accepted Mexico’s sovereign right to take over the Sinclair holdings. “
He was a realist,” the American ambassador to Mexico said at the time, “and knew that the interests of his company depended on the policy of give and take.”

He was also an adamant and outspoken opponent of the New Deal, once telling FDR to his face, “
You know, Mr. President, I’m against everything you stand for politically,” but in the circumstances of the war, he was too good a man not to be put to use.

His first assignment came right after Pearl Harbor, when FDR summoned Hurley to the White House and told him, “We’re looking for a man with
a little piracy in his blood.” The Japanese were in the process of overrunning European and American colonial possessions in Southeast Asia and had imposed a blockade of the Philippines, where General
Douglas MacArthur was pinned down on the Bataan peninsula with 76,000 American and Filipino troops. Hurley was being asked to find ways to break the blockade, and he accepted the mission. He went to Australia, hired ships, and ran ammunition and other supplies to the beleaguered soldiers. In at least one instance, as noted earlier, he camouflaged his blockade-running vessels by having them fly the Japanese flag, which was a technical act of piracy—FDR got what he asked for. Had Hurley ever been captured by the enemy, the Japanese could have executed him as a criminal rather than accord him the rights due to a prisoner of war. “
We were out-shipped, out-planned, out-manned, and out-gunned by the Japanese forces from the beginning,” he said
later, ruing the fact that for every ship that slipped through the Japanese encirclement, two were lost. Eventually, after MacArthur escaped to Australia, the Americans surrendered and were forced on the notorious Bataan death march to prison camps.

In 1943, Roosevelt sent Hurley on his first trip to China, to prepare Chiang Kai-shek for his appearance at the upcoming Cairo conference, where the American president was to meet Churchill before moving on to Tehran for meetings with Stalin. A year later, Hurley was back, as boisterous and optimistic as ever, ready to undertake his new job as FDR’s special representative in China.

Hurley’s arrival in China
coincided with a mood of crisis over matters other than KMT-CCP relations. The gravest one was caused by the continuing Ichigo offensive and the Chinese failure to stop it. “
It was obvious to me when I first arrived that Jap objective was our base at Kunming and this was also the opinion of the Generalissimo,” Hurley said in an early cable to Stettinius. “Our situation here is desperate and if we do not stop the Japs before Kunming all the protestations we may make will have no effect on the verdict of history. America will have failed in China. For that reason I think that you should use all of your power to give Wedemeyer what a victory requires.”

On the same day, December 6, as Hurley’s “consternation” cable to Stettinius,
George Atcheson, the gifted, experienced, and knowledgeable number two at the American embassy in
Chungking, wrote to Stettinius: “
We do not wish to be alarmists, but it seems clear to us that the time has come to take precautionary measures and prepare as best we can for such contingencies as may arise”—i.e., the possibility that Japan would bypass Kunming and advance directly on the government’s temporary capital in Chungking instead. Atcheson recommended that non-essential American personnel be evacuated, that an alternative temporary capital be chosen, perhaps in the remote Chinese far west, and that all confidential files plus the cores and the rotors to the code machines at the Chungking embassy be destroyed. Atcheson thought of everything, even asking Washington to provide “a considerable reserve supply of American currency … since Chinese currency is likely to become useless.”

Alarm over the consequences of continuing, unresolved Chinese
division in the face of Japanese aggression was also raised by General
Claire Chennault. The situation, he had told FDR directly at the end of September,

Roosevelt’s response to these alarms was to increase the pressure on Chiang to do exactly what Chiang couldn’t do. On September 16, during a meeting with Churchill in Quebec, he fired off a lengthy letter to Chiang warning him that while “
we are rolling the enemy back in defeat all over the world,” and while “our advance across the Pacific is swift,” it could all be “too late for China.” Needed now is “drastic and immediate action on your part” or the consequence will be “military disaster.” Specifically, FDR demanded that Chiang do two things: spring into action on the
Salween, so the land route to China could be reopened, and put Stilwell in “unrestricted command of all your forces.” Only by doing these two things, Roosevelt implied, could Chiang keep American aid flowing. “I have expressed my thoughts with complete frankness,” Roosevelt concluded, “because it appears plainly evident to all of us here that all of your and our efforts to save China [will have been wasted] by further delays.”

Here is the president of the United States, having sent millions of his fellow citizens into mortal danger in war, doing what he must, which was to insist that the beneficiary of the American sacrifice shoulder its share of the burden. And Roosevelt’s advisers had been telling him that if China lost Kunming, it would essentially be knocked out of
the war, and then “
at least an additional year and possibly several years of additional warfare … would be required to defeat Japan and liberate China.” But in truth, as it turned out, the alarms of Hurley, Atcheson, and Chennault turned out to be exaggerated. There was no Japanese run on Kunming or on Chungking, no need to evacuate the embassy.
Chiang’s “defense in depth” strategy was in this effective. Meanwhile, Chiang believed that in tying down a million Japanese troops in China, he was already shouldering the burden of the war, and what, he could have asked in any case, did the American president mean by “our efforts to save China”? China had survived for eight years, four of them before Pearl Harbor, while the United States was supplying Japan with strategic raw materials. What reason was there to think China couldn’t go on for a few months or even years more now that the United States was “rolling the enemy back in defeat all over the world”? Was it wrong of him to believe that saving China meant not fighting Japan, which was nearly defeated anyway, but making sure that a Communist dictatorship didn’t position itself to take power once Japan had been disposed of by the valiant Americans?