By Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, W.W. Norton & Company, 476 pages, $28.95
George Catlett Marshall is rightly regarded as among the greatest soldier-statesmen in American history, comparable in his achievements to Dwight Eisenhower and, perhaps, to George Washington himself. Appointed chief of staff by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, Marshall oversaw the transformation of the United States Army from a small, stagnant force into a mighty engine of war, then helped to direct its successful use in Europe and the Pacific. Praised by Harry Truman as “the greatest man of World War II” and by Winston Churchill as the true “architect of victory,” Marshall would go on to play an essential role in shaping the subsequent, uneasy peace. The enormous programme of economic assistance that bore his name helped rebuild the shattered nations of Western Europe, securing their place in an alliance of liberal democracies that contained the Soviet Union and ultimately won the Cold War.
Marshall’s many successes bracketed one notable failure. Within days of retiring from the Army and returning to his home in Leesburg, Virginia, for a well-deserved rest, he received a telephone call summoning him back to government service. Two weeks later, after a series of hasty meetings with Truman and his top advisers, Marshall boarded a plane for the long trip to China. He would spend the next two years there, trying in vain to head off a renewed civil war between forces under the command of the Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong and their Nationalist rivals led by the Washington-backed ally Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan’s book, The China Mission, tells the story of Marshall’s unsuccessful mission to China. Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, it is at once a revealing study of character and leadership, a vivid reconstruction of a critical episode in the history of the early Cold War and an insightful meditation on the limits of American power even at its peak.
Marshall was renowned for his skills as a strategist and an organiser, but also for personal characteristics. His rectitude and dedication to duty were legendary, prompting Churchill to label him “the noblest Roman of them all.” He could be severe, even forbidding (at one point telling his deputy Dean Acheson, “I have no feelings except those reserved for Mrs Marshall”), and seems to have evoked a mixture of fear, awe and devotion from his subordinates. But Marshall also had a sense of proportion and humility, and an aversion to self-aggrandisement and self-promotion that set him apart from contemporaries like Douglas MacArthur.
All of these qualities, but especially the combination of doggedness and strategic vision, emerge clearly from Kurtz-Phelan’s finely detailed account. Despite a realistic appraisal of the enormous difficulties involved, Marshall was relentless in his attempts to bring the Communists and Nationalists together, first negotiating a cease-fire and then working to merge their respective armies and to join the parties into some form of unity government. When talks faltered he shuttled back and forth between the two sides, meeting for hours at a time, first with Chiang, then with Mao’s deputy, Zhou Enlai, flying to Yenan to confer directly with Mao and travelling repeatedly by plane, boat, jeep and sedan chair when the generalissimo retreated to his summer home in the mountains outside Nanjing. Marshall “clings so tenaciously to a seemingly hopeless job,” one observer noted. “More meetings and more futility all the time,” another wrote in his diary. “I don’t see how the general stands it.”
Unlike some Western observers, Marshall had no illusions that the Communists were mere “agrarian reformers” with genuine democratic inclinations. Nor was he blind to the faults of the Nationalists. Although he respected Chiang, Marshall recognised that many of his lieutenants were corrupt and inclined to use brutal tactics to suppress their opponents, including the assassination of moderate, anti-Communist advocates of liberal political reforms.
American strategy was based on the hope that forcing the two sides to cooperate would eventually have a moderating influence on both. It was a long shot, but as far as Marshall was concerned, there really was no alternative. Cutting off all assistance to Chiang would only harden his worst inclinations while abandoning any hope of shaping his behaviour. On the other hand, notwithstanding the Nationalists’ advantages in American-supplied weapons and logistics, Marshall was sceptical that they could finish off their enemies and establish control over all of China. As he correctly anticipated, trying to do so would plunge the nation back into all-out civil war and open the way for increased Soviet involvement and influence.
Looking back, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that a final duel to the death between Nationalist and Communist forces was inevitable, even if its outcome perhaps was not. As Kurtz-Phelan correctly notes, Marshall’s ability to exert influence over the Nationalists was limited from the start by Chiang’s belief (bolstered by back-channel communications with his friends in Washington) that, in the end, the United States would have no choice but to support him. (Here American policymakers were faced for the first time with what would become a recurrent problem of the postwar era: how to impose reform on a weak, corrupt and dependent client facing a ruthless and highly motivated opponent.) In retrospect it also seems obvious that, despite Marshall’s earnest efforts, both Chiang and Mao were simply playing for time, waiting for the most opportune moment to finish their two-decade struggle.
The eventual Communist victory triggered recriminations and an ugly, polarising debate back in the United States. Congressional Republicans claimed that the Truman administration had “lost” China by not backing Chiang to the hilt. Some suggested that this failure was the work of a vast web of Communist spies and sympathisers operating at all levels of the government. Even Marshall, with his towering reputation, was not immune. Senator Joe McCarthy, an early practitioner of the dark art of spreading “fake news,” denounced him for “criminal folly” and put him at the heart of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”
Marshall’s reaction to such demagogy was nonchalant: “If I have to explain at this point that I am not a traitor to the United States I hardly think it’s worth it.” On the more serious question of whether an alternative approach could have prevented Mao’s victory and perhaps put China on a path towards liberal democracy, he does not appear to have harboured deep doubts. Even a commitment of several hundred thousand American troops would not have been sufficient to guarantee success, and it would have diverted scarce resources from “more vital regions,” like Western Europe, where the United States had “a reasonable opportunity of meeting or thwarting the Communist threat.”
The “loss” of China may have been unavoidable, at least at anything close to an acceptable cost to the United States, but it was still a tragedy. As China continues to gain in wealth and power, while its political system devolves into a one-man dictatorship, it would appear that the final chapters of this tragedy have yet to be written.
–New York Times News Service
Aaron L. Friedberg, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, is the author of A Contest for Supremacy: China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia.
