Russian tsars and Chinese emperors, Kennan was absolutely sure, would not get on well together. In 1947, Kennan wrote, "The men of the Kremlin would suddenly discover that this fluid and subtle oriental movement which they thought they held in the palm of their hand had quietly oozed away between their fingers and there was nothing left there but a ceremonial Chinese bow and a polite giggle."

In government it does not pay to be right too soon, especially if you are considered on the more dovish side. Kennan was prophetic, and he would be proven right in a surprisingly short time as the tensions between the two nations escalated in the early 1960s and there were constant skirmishes between the two great Communist powers along the Russian-Chinese border. But in 1949—50, in an administration increasingly under siege, dealing with the shocking news of Joe One and Chiang's departure from the mainland, his ruminations on the coming tensions between Russia and China were not exactly what Acheson wanted to hear. By 1949, David Bruce, another of the bright rising figures at State, noted that his friend Acheson could no longer bear to read Kennan's cables, believing them too long and windy, finally too literary. His timing was not nearly as good as it had been when he had sent the Long Telegram. But nothing told how* quickly the Cold War had escalated, and how the domestic attacks against administration policies had increased, than the fact that Kennan had gone from superstar to outsider in just three years. The problem he posed to Acheson was not merely that he was wordy and argumentative; it was that almost everything he said was right, the affirmation of policies, given different political conditions, that Acheson would gladly have followed but no longer could because of the changed politics of the era. Acheson was too proud to admit it, either at the time or later in his memoirs, but there was in Kennan's dissent, in his unwillingness to adjust to changing political forces, something of an unspoken rebuke to the secretary, a man who did not like to be rebuked, or to admit that he had been bent on any of his policies.

It was not just his dissent on the Soviets and China. Among other issues where Acheson and Kennan parted company was the question of whether or not to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb, or the Super as it was known, which was then being pushed by Edward Teller, a former Manhattan Project scientist who had turned bitterly on Robert Oppenheimer. When Truman wanted a special committee to study the issue of the Super, Acheson chose Nitze, a Teller supporter, to head it, which meant that the special committee would almost surely favor going ahead on it. To Nitze the issue of the Super was a pragmatic one—would the bomb work? He had been convinced by Teller that it would. To Kennan, who had grown close to Oppenheimer, a man anguished over what his own weapon had wrought at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was not simply a practical or scientific question but a moral one as well. He thought the Super was nothing less than a potential moral catastrophe. What both Oppenheimer and Kennan believed was that, with the decision to develop the H-bomb, a limitless, unwinnable superpower arms race would be launched, that would, in the end, increase global dangers immeasurably while adding no additional degree of security.

When Nitze's committee reported, as expected, that the United States ought to go ahead with the Super, it suggested as well that a major review be undertaken of the total national security picture. Acheson's hand was very much at work here—this was the study he wanted in order to initiate his long-desired overhaul of national security policies. Nitze would lead it. On January 31, 1950, six days after Acheson's remark about Hiss, Truman gave the go-ahead for such a comprehensive review.

Where Kennan thought of Stalin's Russia as primarily defensive in its policies, albeit with a deep-rooted national paranoia, Nitze offered a very different vision. "In the aggregate," he noted at the time, "recent Soviet moves reflect not only a mounting militancy but suggest a boldness that is essentially new—and borders on recklessness." In effect, he was saying that the United States as a great power could not base its policies on Kennan's assumptions about tsarist Russia, no matter how brilliant their author. What if Kennan was wrong? Kennan after all was a diplomat and a historian, not an intelligence man, and if his view of Russia was wrong, then the United States would have premised its entire security position on a presumption of historic truths, and might end up unspeakably vulnerable.

To Acheson and his allies, Nitze's NSC paper would finally begin the process of making America's military strength compatible with its rhetoric and their vision of its postwar role: the United States would continue to talk big, but it would carry more than just a single big stick—the potentially unusable atomic one; now America would have a more flexible military response. To Kennan, on the other hand, what Nitze (and Acheson) were proposing was a militarization of American policy—in effect, the creation of a national security state, which would drain far too much of the nation's financial resources and would inevitably create in its Soviet rival a comparable military defense state. The Soviet atomic bomb, he wrote, did not really change the balance of power: "Insofar as we see ourselves in any heightened trouble at the present moment, that feeling is largely of our own making."

When Acheson heard the estimated price, what they called the back of the envelope cost, of around S50 billion, he told Nitze, "Paul, don't put that figure in the report. You're right to tell me and I'll tell the president, but don't put any figure in the report." Finally, on March 22, 1950, they met with Johnson and the Joint Chiefs in Nitze's office to go over the draft document. The meeting started out peacefully enough. Johnson asked Acheson if he had read the draft. Acheson had. Johnson, of course, had not. In fact, he had only heard of it that morning. Suddenly, it became clear to him that he had been completely cut out of the play and totally ambushed. Acheson and his man Nitze were obviously in charge, had clearly been in close communication with the Chiefs, and just as clearly intended to give the uniformed military not only many of the things he had been cutting out of their budgets but more than he had ever imagined possible. He was, he realized, completely isolated. As Acheson later wTote, all of a sudden "he lunged forward, with a crash of chair legs on the floor and fist on the table, scaring me out of my shoes."

Acheson and Nitze, he shouted, were trying to keep him in the dark and he would not tolerate it—he would not be subjected to a humiliation like this. "This is a conspiracy being conducted behind my back in order to subvert my policies. I and the Chiefs are leaving now," he said. Soon after, Johnson went to Acheson's office to argue his case one more time and started screaming that he had been insulted. Acheson waved him away, then had others call Truman to tell him what had happened. An hour later, Truman returned the call and told Acheson to proceed with the paper. The president was not yet approving NSC 68—events in Korea would take care of that—but Acheson and Nitze were in charge of the play. Six months later Truman fired Johnson and replaced him with George Marshall. Acheson was convinced that Johnson was unstable at the time.

NSC 68 was a defining document. It confirmed the American response to the harshness of the Cold War, American mistrust of the Soviets matching Soviet mistrust of Americans, which would in turn create a cycle of ever expanding mistrust and ever greater defense spending on both sides. It defined the global conflict in almost purely ideological terms, especially striking in a paper so secret that it would be seen only by top officials: "The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a fanatical faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." At first, Truman had remained noncommittal about NSC 68 and was quite uneasy with the implicit costs involved. Then, the Korean War began and the Cold War escalated into a hot war, and the force of events had their own financial imperatives. The debate over NSC 68 had become academic, the issue overtaken by events. The budget, which NSC 68 suggested would have to triple, now tripled because of the war. Truman himself never had to make a decision on NSC 68. In fact, by the late fall of 1951, when the fiscal 1952 Pentagon budget was being prepared, it had quadrupled from S13 billion in pre-Korean War days to $55 billion. "Korea," Acheson would note years later at a seminar at Princeton, "saved us."

HARRY TRUMAN WAS, whatever else, a decisive man. Even some of Roosevelt's people, who in the early days of his presidency had looked down on Truman, this seemingly undistinguished man who had replaced their beloved leader, now understood that. Some Roosevelt insiders had left immediately, believing they could not give their loyalty to him; others came to respect him and understand that their commitment was to the office and not to the man, and that Truman in his own way was an uncommon man. Though Truman would turn out to be the last American president who had not been to college, he had been exceptionally bookish as a child, was unusually well read, and was a serious, if amateur, self-taught historian. Perhaps most important of all, he did not go around doubting himself once he took office. He might not have sought the presidency and it might have come to him in the most unwanted way, but he was going to serve and make his decisions as best he could. He was not, even before he was elected on his own in 1948, going to be governing hat in hand, as if he did not deserve the office and ought more properly to be secreted away in the small office where they still hid vice presidents. The country deserved better than that. Besides, he understood that if he governed like that, as a kind of stand-in for a great man, he would be devoured by his enemies, some of whom were institutional enemies of the presidency, some of whom were ideological enemies, and some of whom were both. He did not intend to be devoured; history judged the devoured too harshly. a lifetime of dealing with ordinary people, in good times and bad—and there had certainly been plenty of those—had convinced him of his skill in reading and judging others, sensing whom he could trust and whom he could not. It had also taught him to get the best people you can, gather the best information possible, ask the best questions you could think of, estimate the likely consequences, then just make the decision and get on with it. He also knew, as he flew back to Washington on the morning after the North Korean attack, that his decisions in the days to come would be on matters of war and peace. Korea would turn out to be in his judgment the most difficult call of his presidency.

In June 1950, he had already served five years as president, and scored two personal triumphs that had immeasurably strengthened his confidence. Though they were in a sense intertwined, the first—his stunning upset victory over Tom Dewey in the 1948 election—had been the more remarkable. Unlikely as it was, his electoral triumph helped clear the way for his other great achievement—his triumph over the still powerful image of Franklin Roosevelt, which finally gave him a presidency of his own (and growing respect from other politicians, the press, and historians, those who make their living judging the presidencies of other men). Escaping the burden of being Roosevelt's successor, and being a man who had come to the office almost by mistake, was a success all too easy to underestimate. He had never, in fact, let the burden of his predecessor's greatness weigh too heavily on him, though he had been a relatively minor figure in the Senate and a virtually invisible one as vice president. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson, the next vice president to succeed to office because the president had died, had been a towering figure in the Senate before replacing John F. Kennedy (who had served for only three years, in contrast to Roosevelt's twelve); yet by contrast he never entirely escaped the emotional and psychological burden of comparisons with his predecessor, or of the way he had at first attained his presidency.

Truman was an easv man to underestimate. He lacked one of the great strengths of the Roosevelt persona: to a nation accustomed to a presidential voice that had been warm, confident, aristocratic, and altogether seductive, Truman's voice was a distinct disappointment, flat and tinny, with little emotional intimacy. His speeches were uninspiring—blunt and oddly without nuance. Some advisers suggested that Truman try to speak more like Roosevelt, and make his speeches more conversational, but he was shrewd enough to know that that was the wrong path, that he could not emulate the great master. All he could do was be himself and hope that the American people would not judge him for what he was not. He was aware that the comparisons with Roosevelt would be unfavorable at first, and they were. In the beginning, he was an easy target for political jokes, and there was often a cruel edge to them. "To err is Truman," said the acid-tongued Martha Taft, wife of Robert Taft, a key Republican senator. "I'm just mild about Harry" went another. A favorite of the moment, wrote the columnist Doris Fleeson, was "I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive." "Poor Harry Truman. And poor people of the United States," wrote Richard Strout, in The New Republic.

Truman became president when he was sixty years old. He was a late bloomer of acceptable but not overweening ambition. His people were farmers and he had done his share of farming as a boy, and in 1948 he had delighted Midwest crowds—his support there was one of the keys to his surprise victory—by telling them that he could seed a 160-acre wheat field "without leaving a skip." He had plowed the old-fashioned way, he added—four Missouri mules, not one of these fancy tractors. In his senior year of high school, through no fault of their own, the Trumans' farm had failed and all chance of a college education for Harry had disappeared. He tried for West Point, his one shot at a free education, but was turned down because of his poor eyesight. (He was blind as a mole, he noted later in life.) His one entrepreneurial attempt, to run a haberdashery shop, lasted a mere three years and ended in failure. He spent much of his time trying to prove to his ever dubious mother-in-law, who came from one of Independence's first families, that he was worthy of the hand of her daughter, that Bess Wallace had not married down. Here success eluded him; he proved better at making the case for his intrinsic value to millions of fellow Americans than to Madge Gates Wallace. He arrived in the Senate in 1934, in his fiftieth year, relatively late in life, as the sparklingly honest representative of the unusually corrupt political machine of Boss Tom Pendergast. It was as if his special assignment within the Pendergast organization had always been to bring it some degree of honor and legitimacy. He was a small-town man with small-town virtues. For much of his life, he wore a triple-band gold Mason's ring and a small lapel button that showed he had served in World War I. He was comfortable in the world of small-town lodges, and was a member of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Moose, and the Elks.

But a life filled with a curious blend of disappointments and relatively few successes (at least on the scale of most men who attain the presidency) had created its own set of strengths. "I liked what I saw. He was direct, unpretentious, clear thinking and forceful," General Omar Bradley wrote after their first meetings. He was not much given to self-deception and there was little artifice to him. He was hardworking, and always well prepared. He did not waste other people's time, nor did he want them to waste his. In contrast to Roosevelt (who loved to play games with people even when he didn't need to), Truman was comparatively simple and significantly less manipulative. What you saw, by and large, was what you got. George Marshall had always been uneasy with Roosevelt and some of the games he played with his top advisers. There had been one unfortunate moment when the president had tried verbal intimacy with Marshall, a man who thought the more formal the relationship with a politician, the straighter it was likely to be. Roosevelt called him by his first name, the first step in what was clearly to be a process of seduction. He immediately understood his own mistake by the coolness it generated. It was General or General Marshall thereafter, not George. Marshall for that reason clearly preferred Truman. There were fewer political land mines around.

In the Senate Truman had been all too aware of his own limitations. A great many of his colleagues were better educated, wealthier, and more successful; they knew worlds of privilege and sophistication he could only guess at. As one of his high school friends, Charlie Ross, later a star reporter for the Sr. Louis Post Dispatch and eventually his press secretary, said of him, "He came to the Senate, I believe, with a definite inferiority complex. He was a better man than he knew." America, at the time he assumed the presidency, was changing rapidly, becoming infinitely more meritocratic, driven by powerful egalitarian forces let loose by World War II and new political benefits that went with them, like the GI Bill, which allowed anyone who had been in the military to go to college. Truman, by contrast, was a product of a far less egalitarian America, which had existed at the turn of the century, one where talented men and women did not always attain careers that reflected their abilities and their ambition.

He was very much a man of his time and his region. "He had only to open his mouth and his origins were plain," WTote his biographer David McCullough. "It wasn't just that he came from a particular part of the country, but from a specific part of the American experience, an authentic pioneer background and a specific place in the American imagination. His Missouri, as he loved to emphasize, was the Missouri of Mark Twain and Jesse James." If Franklin Roosevelt seemed to step out of the pages of a novel by Edith Wharton, McCullough added, then Harry Truman came from the pages of Sinclair Lewis.

Little was really known of him as a man, even by those who had placed him on the Democratic ticket in 1944. It was not so much that they had wanted him as that they did not like the other vice presidential possibilities, most particularly Henry Wallace, the sitting vice president. As Jonathan Daniels, the Southern editor, noted, they "knew what they wanted, but did not know what they were getting." He was perhaps as true a reflection of the common man as the country produced for the presidency in the modern era. "What a test of democracy if it works!" Roy Roberts, the editor of the Kansas City Star and a part of the inner circle of Republican power brokers, shrewdly wrote during the first days of the Truman presidency. For that was exactly what it was, a test of democracy. He Was also a very good working politician, with a keen sense of what was on the minds of ordinary people, their needs and their fears, because his own background was so ordinary and because for so long his life had been so much like theirs.

When he was first catapulted into the presidency, he complained frequently to his friends about his dislike for it—the Great White Prison, he called it—and seemed at one point ready to offer his support in the 1948 race to Dwight Eisenhower, if he committed to the Democratic Party. Only gradually did he change his mind. The presidency cramped his personal lifestyle and separated him from his family—Bess and his daughter, Margaret, always seemed to be back in Independence and he longed to be with them—but he had never been a man to back off hard jobs, and the more he saw of some of the other men who thought they should replace him, the more confident he became that the country was better served with him in the White House. If he needed to justify his policies by running for election in 1948, then he would make that run—it was not that great a sacrifice. There was a certain bantam rooster cockiness to him. He would not back down from a fight, and, in time, the American people sensed that and rewarded him for it.

His small-town roots were not that different from many of the Republicans who now became his most bitter political enemies, but his own personal odyssey more often than not had been much harder than theirs, and so he had grave doubts about some of the small-town verities that they so unquestioningly believed in. In American politics of that period, people still voted their pocketbooks, and the Democrats, because of the New Deal, still had the economic whip hand, even in much of what was considered the heartland. A small town of eight thousand might have one thousand blue collar workers at a plant, almost all of whom were Democrats; only a handful of a town's residents—factory owners, managers, and ancillary local allies like the banker, the lawyer, and the doctor—were people almost sure to vote Republican. Most ordinary Americans were living considerably better than they had in the past. They did not believe the gains they had achieved were, as the Republicans seemed to insinuate, socialistic. Few working people then felt they would prosper under a Republican administration. "The worker's working every day/ drives to work in a new coupe/ Don't let 'em take it away" went a Democratic Party theme song of the period. The cultural issues that would, starting in the mid-1960s, gradually tear at the Democratic coalition of blue collar working people, children of the great immigrant waves from Europe, black people, and the white politicians of the one-party South, were not yet important. Labor was newly unionized, still extremely powerful, and grateful for its recent economic gains.

When he prepared for his own presidential race in 1948, Truman did not believe the economic base of politics had changed that much. He was a fiscal conservative anyway and very careful in those first three years in office to minimize any tax increases. In addition, he had a sixth sense about how to exploit the fault lines in the Republican Party: the difference between what it said were its policies, when it was at a national convention appealing to a national audience, and what its far more conservative leadership in Congress believed. He judged the Republicans in Congress to be a party out of touch with average Americans in the urban and increasingly influential suburban areas of the big states. They had killed any number of liberal items he had proposed—on housing, aid to education, and medical care, and then had gone ahead at their convention and called for their passage. Well, he planned to put an illuminating light on that split personality; so, when nominated in 1948, he promptly announced that he was going to call Congress back into session—to pass the items the Republicans supported in their platform. It was a masterful move and proved a decisive one as well. The Republicans were not pleased to be summoned—"the petulant Ajax of the Ozarks," Senator Styles Bridges called Truman.

When the 1948 campaign first began, the task before him seemed hopeless. Even the big-city bosses were against him. On hearing that Dwight Eisenhower had no interest in the Democratic nomination, Frank Hague, the Jersey City (New Jersey) boss, said, "Truman, Harry Truman. Oh my God." Everything appeared stacked against him: in the eyes of many, both politically and as a human being, he had seemed to shrink in the vast space left by his predecessor, and the Democrats had been in power too long. There were the inevitable scandals. Some of the close friends whom he trusted had predictably eaten too well at the public trough. The scandals, though they did not touch Truman personally, brought back the scent of the Pendergast machine. The liberal wing of his own party, led by Jimmy Roosevelt, the late president's most liberal son, had tried desperately to draft Dwight Eisenhower, even though most of the people who liked Ike had no earthly idea what his politics were, and despite Eisenhower's own clear rejection of a race. No one seemed to want Truman to head the ticket. "We don't want to run a race with a dead Missouri mule," said Governor Ben Laney of Arkansas.

The 1948 election turned out to be crucial in a way that no one understood at the time, and fateful as well because of the bitterness it created in a party that suffered its fifth straight defeat. The Republicans were prohibitive favorites. Truman, said Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of the country's most powerful publisher, at the Republican convention, where they were celebrating the fall victory even before the summer was over, was "a gone goose." Every knowledgeable political expert had conceded the election to the heavily favored Tom Dewey, who was considered admirable, if not likeable. Early in the campaign the Republican high command had even decided that it would be a waste of the party's money to continue polling, because the outcome was such a sure thing. One major pollster, Elmo Roper, announced in early September that he too would stop polling because the election was a foregone conclusion: "Thomas E. Dewey is almost as good as elected.... That being true I can think of nothing duller or more intellectually barren than acting like a sports announcer who feels he must pretend that he is witnessing a neck-and-neck race." All of this had a considerable effect on Dewey himself. When another Republican visited Dewey at his Pawling, New York, farm, Dewey showed him the Roper statement and then said, "My job is to prevent anything from rocking the boat." Clearly the principal aim of the campaign was not so much to define what a mid-century Republican victory would mean as to avoid making a mistake. That, of course, was in its own way a terrible mistake, even though the Democratic Party seemed badly fragmented. It had split three ways, and thereby on paper at least seemed unusually vulnerable: the far left going off with Henry Wallace; while the Southern Democrats, or Dixiecrats, as they would be known, followed Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. None of that seemed to bother Truman very much. Certainly, it made things harder, although the symbols of a party unraveling were far more dramatic than the unraveling itself. (At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Washington in February 1948, Senator Olin Johnston, a Democrat from South Carolina, bought a large table, which because his wife was on the arrangements committee was set up right in front of the podium. Then, because the dinner would not be segregated, the Johnstons kept the table but made sure that no one showed up—a deliberate insult to the sitting president. "We paid Si,100 to keep this table vacant," one of their friends said.)

What did bother Truman as he approached the fall campaign was that the Democratic Party, though it had been in office for sixteen years, had absolutely no money, and no one was willing to serve as its finance committee chairman. It was an additional but hardly needed reminder of how slim the Democratic chances were. On September 1, 1948, with the start of the campaign two weeks away, Truman had summoned eighty Party luminaries—men with clout and access to money—to the White House to talk about their financial problems. Only fifty had showed up. The president had then asked for a volunteer to run the finance committee. No one stepped up. The next day Truman called Louis Johnson and pleaded with him to take the job. Johnson agreed to do it. He was a classic example of a certain Washington type, a wheeler-dealer, a self-made man with an inflated sense of his political abilities and possibilities. Because he saw no limits to his ability, Johnson tended to move aggressively into any power vacuum he found. He intended when Truman's presidency was finished to run for the presidency himself. His political base was his connection with the American Legion, whose senior officer he had been and whose views on foreign policy he tended to reflect. "He was a gambler," said Jean Kearney, who had worked for the Democratic National Committee that summer. He got into the business of raising money for Truman, she added, "in a cold blooded, calculating way—he gambled that Truman might win, and if he raised money for him, it would advance his own standing as a Washington lawyer and national figure."

At that moment Truman's standing was so low as to be off the charts, and the Democrats were without money, seriously burdened by debt. Johnson came in and signed a personal note for s 100,000, which allowed the party to get out of debt and for Truman's train, scheduled to leave Union Station for its whistle-stop tour of the country on September 17, to depart on time, and go farther than Pennsylvania, which for a time had seemed likely to be the last stop. Johnson did a remarkable job as finance chairman, raising more than $2 million in two months. When the campaign was over, Truman was deeply in his debt, which was why, when James Forrestal came apart emotionally, Johnson got the Defense portfolio.

The lack of money as they began the 1948 campaign was more important than the party's interior ideological divisions. The Wallace campaign, from the left, actually gave Truman protection against charges that he might be too far left, since no one was attacking him harder than the Communists and their fellow travelers. As for the Dixiecrats, they carried only four Southern states, for a total of thirty-nine electoral votes. Truman's special strength that year was that he never lost faith in himself or in the American people. He campaigned vigorously in blunt and simplistic terms. Economic issues were still primal. Before Truman started on his campaign, Vice President Alben Barkley had told him, "Go out there and mow 'em down." "I'll mow 'em down, Alben," Truman had reportedly answered, "and I'll give 'em hell." Somehow that part—about giving them hell—had gotten out, and the crowds loved it. There was always someone at every stop egging him on, yelling "Give 'em hell, Harry," and he did just that, and the American people responded enthusiastically. If he could not be Roosevelt, then he had found the perfect role, the cocky little underdog, his back to the wall, fighting back against the big boys. He had not exactly sought that image, but the role suited both him and the era perfectly.

Everyone had been sure that he was finished, except the candidate himself. In the 1948 campaign he managed to define himself in the eyes of his fellow citizens in a way he had been incapable of doing in the previous three and a half years. It was one of the last political campaigns to be conducted from trains, a whistle-stop visit to the American people, often in small towns, where Truman felt an easy affinity with the crowds gathered around the caboose. It was a very comfortable incarnation, utterly authentic. "He is good on the back of the train," his shrewd Democratic colleague Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House, once noted, "because he is one of the folks. He smiles with them and not at them, laughs with them and not at them."

His gritty, earthy campaign was carried out so close to the voters that it took place under the radar screen of the taste-making part of the media and the top people in the Republican Party (and even many in his own party). The Republicans were already overconfident, given the poor Democratic showing in the 1946 midterm elections, and they believed the myth of Truman's incompetence. Dewey helped out by running a disastrous campaign. "The Dewey campaign," said Clarence Buddington Kelland, a Republican national committeeman from Arizona, "was smug, arrogant, and supercilious." For Dewey campaigned as if he were the incumbent, Truman the challenger, and the Democrats a minority party. His speeches were boring and full of truisms. Some aides, like Herbert Brownell, blamed his wife for not wanting him to engage in partisan attacks because she wanted him to seem as presidential as possible, above the base quality of politics. If that were true, it would not have been the first time she had been a decisive force in terms of his image. Other aides had argued for years that he should shave off his trademark mustache—it had been an asset when he was a tough district attorney, but as a presidential candidate it made him look cold and hard. "His face was so small and the mustache was so large," Brownell lamented years later. But Mrs. Dewey liked the mustache, and so it stayed.

Dewey was in fact an exceptionally able man, well prepared for the presidency after six years as governor of New York—he would eventually be elected for three terms—essentially the same political staircase Roosevelt had taken to the nation's highest office. At forty-six he was young and seemingly modern—the first presidential nominee born in the twentieth century. He had started as a Mr. Clean, a prosecutor intent on going after the New York mob, and perhaps, some critics thought, that was the problem. It had been a role that demanded a certain icy briskness, a manner invaluable to a prosecutor in front of a jury, that was not necessarily attractive in a presidential candidate, where an instinctive, tangible humanity is of the essence. He looked, said the acerbic Alice Roosevelt Longworth in a quip that seemed to cling to him, like "the little man on the wedding cake." He was, said one longtime associate, "cold. Cold as an icicle in February." Even on his campaign train, surrounded by other Republican pols, he would excuse himself at a certain point so he could lunch alone. "Smile, Governor," a photographer called to him during the campaign. "I thought I was," he answered.

Nor was his personal style, or lack thereof, his only problem. The terrible fault lines of the Republican Party were another. To the isolationists, he was the living symbol of everything that was wrong with their party. Colonel Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune hated him for his internationalism and for his defeat in the 1944 election, and constantly belittled him. In what turned out to be the most critical decision of the campaign, he held back from taking up the only issue that might have excited them, that of subversion, and refused to make it a central part of his campaign. Indeed, at a key moment in a debate with Harold Stassen during the Oregon primary fight, he had opposed outlawing the Communist Party. It would, he said—and he was a law-and-order man—only serve to drive the Communists underground. Other prominent Republicans, beginning to sense the blood in the water, and knowing they were in trouble on economic issues, pushed him to use the Communists-in-Washington charge. William Loeb, the right-wing New Hampshire publisher, and Senator Styles Bridges, who was Loeb's man in the Senate as well as the Republican national campaign manager, pleaded with Dewey to use the subversion issue against Truman and the Democrats. He listened to them carefully and then, in the words of one of his campaign aides, Hugh Scott, said he would "fleck it lightly." Instead he thought it demeaning to accuse the president of the United States of being soft on Communism. He was not, he told Senator Styles Bridges, going to go around "looking under beds."

His campaign was uniquely bland. Even as Truman was drawing ever larger crowds, Dewey continued making the same curiously antiseptic, passionless speeches. His campaign, wrote the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier Journal, could be "boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead." Still, victory seemed such a sure thing. The media, which in those pre-television days was still the press corps, helped to make Truman's victory a great surprise because its members spent so much time interviewing one another and ignoring what was happening right in front of them. In mid-September, for example, Joseph Alsop, then an important syndicated columnist with a home base on the influential New York Herald Tribune, had witnessed two events: Truman's speech at the national plowing contest in Iowa, before an enthusiastic audience of seventy-five thousand—the president was sharp, focused, and very much on the attack—and soon after, a Dewey speech to a disappointingly small crowd of about eight thousand at Drake University, also in Iowa. A reporter who was responding to political nuance out in the field might have sensed something was up, but Alsop did not. "There was something sad about the contrast between the respective campaign debuts here in Iowa," he wrote. "The Truman show was threadbare and visibly unsuccessful—the Dewey show was opulent. It was organized down to the last noise-making device. It exuded confidence. The contest was really too uneven. After it was over one felt a certain sympathy for the obstinately laboring president."

In mid-October, Newsweek polled fifty political writers scattered throughout the country. Every single one predicted a Dewey win. The Truman people knew the article was coming, but the headline, "Fifty Political Experts Predict a Dewey Victory," was disheartening nonetheless. Onlv one man did not appear to be bothered by it, the candidate himself. "Oh those damned fellows; they're always wrong anyway," he said. "Forget it, boys, and let's get on with the job." On the eve of the election, the press was still getting it wrong. Alistair Cooke, of the Manchester Guardian, titled his last preelection piece "Harry Truman—Study of a Failure," and the people who put out the then-influential Kiplinger newsletter devoted their preelection issue to "What Dewey Will Do."

In the end Truman won relatively handily: 24.1 million votes to Dewey's 21.9 million; he carried twenty-eight states, with 303 electoral votes, to Dewey's sixteen, with 189 electoral votes, and he would have carried Dewey's home state of New York if Wallace had not siphoned off votes on the left. It was one of the great upsets in American political history. The newly reelected president celebrated famously by holding up for photographers a copy of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Dewey Beats Truman." The comedians had a field day. "The only way a Republican can get in the White House now is to marry Margaret Truman," Groucho Marx said.

For the Republicans, it was the apocalypse. Roosevelt was gone, but the Democrats, guided by the little haberdasher about whom they had felt such total contempt, had still won. In addition the Democrats had gained nine seats in the Senate. They had scored a miraculous victory, but there would be a brutal price to pay, and foreign policy—or more accurately, loyalty and security as they affected foreign policy—would be where it would come due, the area where the Republicans found fertile ground.

That Truman was a truly skilled, superior politician, that he had managed deftly to work most of the traditional Democratic groups while cutting into the Republican hold on the farm states, did not dawn on many of his opponents for a long time—he had to leave the White House before many of them realized how talented he really had been. "I don't care how it is explained. It defies all common sense to send that roughneck ward politician back to the White House," said Bob Taft, in words that helped explain why Truman had won. Walter Lippmann, the noted political columnist, thought Truman did not have the soul or spirit or belief of a true New Dealer, but that he had shrewdly kept the Roosevelt political alliance together. To the Republican conservatives, the idea that he could triumph, when it was so clearly their turn, had been unthinkable. (One of the best books written about that election was in fact titled Our of the Jaws of Victory.) Afterward they blamed Dewey and the liberal wing of their party for having run another me-too race; though it is likely that, in the climate of that moment, if Truman had run against their favorite, Robert Taft, the gap might have been even wider.

In retrospect it is impossible to underestimate the immense impact on the Republican Party of the Truman victory—that and the desperate need to find a new issue, which it created, and the decision that the issue would be the fall of China or, in a broader sense, subversion in Washington. What might have happened if Dewey had won, whether the essential bipartisanship that had existed for almost a decade might have continued with only minor adjustments, and whether the bitter accusations of treason against senior officials might have been greatly tempered, remains a fascinating question. If Dewey had been president and John Foster Dulles his secretary of state, would the Republican right have gone after them anywhere near as cruelly as they went after Truman and Acheson? Might the nation have escaped the ugly fratricidal charges that became known as the McCarthy period, but which were broader in what they represented than the charges issued by the Wisconsin senator? Might Dewey as commander in chief in the years to come have had far more latitude in dealing with (and if necessary relieving) an obstinate Douglas MacArthur, a Republican hero? Or might MacArthur, aware that he had less political leverage under Dewey than Truman, have operated with more respect for his superiors?

As the Democrats celebrated Truman's victory, few bothered to ponder what the loss of five elections in a row might mean to the minority party, many of whose most important figures now worried that they might be part of a permanent minority party. For the Republicans, the defeat meant no more Mr. Nice Guy. If they were blocked politically by a blue collar American economy and the rise—and political muscularity—of organized labor, then they would no longer fleck the issue of subversion lightly. Loyalty and anti-Communism would be their new themes, the mantra of attack central to their campaigns. To this end they would be helped greatly by forces outside anyone's control, most particularly the implosion of the government of Chiang Kai-shek, which would finally give them their defining issue. Domestic politics were about to grow far more bitter. The charge against the Democrats would be twenty years of treason.

ALL OF THIS-the rise of China as a major domestic political issue, the increasingly polarized debate about American foreign policy, and the fact that the Democratic administration, no matter how hard-line in the view of some of its critics on the left, was being accused of being soft—meant the Korean War was never seen in isolation as just a small war in a small country; it was never just about Korea. It was always joined to something infinitely larger—China, a country inspiring the most bitter kind of domestic political debate. As the Truman administration sent troops to Korea, there was always a vast dark unanswered question haunting them, which was the threat of the entry of Chinese Communist troops into the war, something the president and most of the men around him greatly feared, and that the general commanding in the field and some of his supporters seemed on occasion ready to welcome. The president thus was taking the country into a difficult war with his hands tied. He was also, though no one liked to admit it, politically on the defensive, which was why he had no choice over who his commanding general was going to be.

Even within his administration there had been a constant squabble over China from the moment that Louis Johnson had come aboard and had begun to take on Acheson. The two men started arguing over aid to Taiwan as soon as Johnson entered the cabinet. Just four days after the North Koreans had crossed the border, Senator Robert Taft, the Republican leader, gave a very emotional speech on the floor of the Senate, attacking Truman for not seeking congressional approval to go to war. Taft also said that the North Korean invasion showed that the Acheson policies on Asia were seriously flawed and that the administration was soft on Communism, and called for Acheson's resignation. A few hours after Taft's speech, Averell Harriman, who had been summoned back from Europe by Truman to help Acheson, happened to be in Johnson's office. The phone rang and Johnson took a call—from Bob Taft. Johnson thereupon praised the speech lavishly (especially the part about Acheson resigning). "That was something that needed to be said," he told Taft. Harriman was absolutely shocked—it was like being behind the lines, listening in on the leaders of the enemy. He was even more stunned when Johnson suggested that if Harriman played ball with him he would help make him secretary of state. Harriman immediately told Truman what had happened, and it was the beginning of the end for Johnson as secretary of defense.

Johnson, pro-Chiang and hostile to their essential policy, they could handle easily enough. He overvalued himself politically, and the senior uniformed military despised him. But MacArthur, their commander in the field, was quite another matter. He seemed if anything to want a confrontation with the administration. One of the early skirmishes between himself and Truman had taken place even before the Korean War started, in late December 1948, in Life magazine, the powerful weekly published by Henry Luce, a China Firster and a major critic of the administration's China policies. "MACARTHUR SAYS FALL OF CHINA IMPERILS U.S.," said the huge headline. MacArthur had sent a sixteen-page cable to the Joint Chiefs, Life reported, which "gave our top military men a historic shock." The Soviets, he had reported, were now in a position to seize Japan. "In the face of facts which seem so plain, how could Washington ever have been so complacent about the consequences of a Communist victory in China?" It was a fascinating piece—the administration's leading military man in Asia had lined up with the administration's sworn enemies on the most sensitive political issue of all. It did not augur well for the future.

The next fight took place in late July 1950. There had been some bitter internal squabbling over Taiwan within the administration, with the Joint Chiefs beginning to shift in their opinion on the value of the island—at its nearest about eighty-five miles off the China coast—now' that the Korean War had begun. Word had come in from intelligence sources—later it turned out to be completely wrong—that an immense Chinese Communist fleet of some four thousand vessels was being gathered on the mainland, possibly as part of preparations to strike Taiwan. That triggered even greater concern. Acheson was wary of any action that would connect U.S. efforts in Korea to Chiang and might widen the war, and he was still opposed to ghing Chiang aid. In his mind any help to Taiwan was also help to Chiang, and would be a fateful American policy move. Truman, however, was beginning to make his own political adjustments. The president suggested a survey team be sent out to gauge the needs for the possible defense of Taiwan. The Chiefs thereupon passed the suggestion on to MacArthur, who decided he would lead the team. At this point the Chiefs became a little nervous and suggested that he might send someone else on this preliminary run—a senior officer, perhaps—since State and Defense were still working out the ground rules for it. Otherwise it might seem more like something of a state visit than an attempt to estimate military needs.

But MacArthur had no intention of waiting and no intention of letting State in as a player. He took off almost immediately, leaving behind in Tokyo the principal representative of State, Bill Sebald, and taking an enormous group of his own senior military people, so large they needed two giant C-54S. On the way over, MacArthur radioed the Pentagon saving that if the Chinese launched their invasion, he intended to use three squadrons of F-8os to repel them. That heightened the tension for everyone back in Washington, most especially Acheson, who believed that the general had already dispatched the three squadrons to Taiwan, thus vastly exceeding his right of command. Acheson was aggravated, but it was also a reminder to the Chiefs, playing their own game in favor of a commitment if not to Chiang, then to Taiwan, that they did not control MacArthur as they might have controlled any other theater commander. It would have been better if Truman himself had ordered MacArthur to delay the trip, Omar Bradley wrote later.

MacArthur landed in Taiwan on July 29, a month and a week into the war. Chiang's people were thrilled. He was greeted as nothing less than a head of state, and both he and Chiang played it for all it was worth. He gallantly kissed Madame Chiang's hand and called Chiang his "old comrade in arms," though they had never met before. Most important, though there was technically no change in policy, the entire trip gave the appearance of a change in policy, or at least the emergence of a separate policy. It was a great boon for Chiang's public relations machinery. Chiang said the United States and China were going to make "common cause" against their mutual enemies. "The net effect of the Nationalist propaganda was to give the impression that the United States was, or was going to be, far more closely allied with Chiang militarily in the struggle against communism in the Far East; that we might even arm him for a 'return to the mainland,'" as Omar Bradley wrote.

Truman and Acheson were both predictably furious. It was a sign, the first of many to come, that Douglas MacArthur did not merely carry out policy but was entitled, at least in his own mind, to make it as well, that he always had his own agenda, and that the agenda was not necessarily the same as that of the president. The president was certain that the general had used the trip to encourage the China Lobby and to increase pressure on him from the right. Hearing how angry the president was, as the furor over his trip mounted in the press, MacArthur aggravated him even more by saying that his visit "has been maliciously misrepresented to the public by those who invariably in the past have propagandized a policy of defeatism and appeasement in the Pacific." That was another slap at Acheson.

Just so there would be no mistaking how importantly Washington took what happened, Truman immediately sent a three-man team to Tokyo and Korea to make sure it did not happen again, and at the same time to find out how the war was going and how much the command was going to need. This was the team that Matt Ridgway was on when he made his evaluation of Walton Walker. But the key figure was Averell Harriman, already Truman's top trouble-shooter. His basic assignment was to improve Washington's relations with MacArthur, find out what he needed in terms of men and materiel, and pass on two messages from the president, as Harriman later noted, first that "I'm going to do everything I can to give him what he wants in the way of support; and secondly I want you to tell him that I don't want him to get us in a war with the Chinese Communists." He was also to try to find out whatever it was that MacArthur had promised Chiang, and to warn him to stay clear of him. But even as Harriman was flying to Tokyo, a story came out of the general's headquarters quoting a reliable source that MacArthur intended to tell Harriman that the war in Korea would prove useless unless the United States fought Communism everywhere it showed its head in Asia.

The Harriman-MacArthur talks were a limited success. The president's instructions, Harriman later reported to the president, were ones that MacArthur might go along with, but his lack of enthusiasm was notable. As a soldier, he would obey, Harriman reported, "but without full conviction." Given Harriman's shrewdness in reading people, that was not a good sign. He was in some ways as grand a figure as MacArthur, had been a major player almost as long, and was in no way intimidated by the general. On arrival, when MacArthur had first-named him—"Averell, good to see you"—he had first-named the commander right back; if it was Averell, then it would be Douglas as well.

It was clear to Harriman that MacArthur thought any form of accommodation with Mao and his China was a policy of appeasement, though he did not put it quite that way. That would come later. He also told Harriman he thought the United States was being too tough on Chiang—they should "stop kicking him around." But though he did not value Chiang's troops—there was no disagreement on that—he was essentially on the other side on the general issue of China, one that had begun to haunt Washington politically. "For reasons that are rather difficult to explain," Harriman reported to Truman on his return, "I did not feel that we came to a full agreement on the way we believed things should be handled in Formosa and with the Generalissimo. He accepted the president's position and will act accordingly, but without full conviction. He has the strange idea that we should back anybody who will fight communism, even though he could not give me an argument why the Generalissimo's fighting communists would be a contribution towards the effective dealing with the communists in China."

One final meeting between MacArthur and the team from Washington had taken place on August 8 at what was still a low point in the war. The North Koreans were then pushing toward the Pusan Perimeter. At that meeting, MacArthur, surprisingly upbeat, had unveiled plans for a surprise landing behind North Korean lines at a port called Inchon, located far up the west coast of Korea. It was the old Bluehearts plan that MacArthur had favored in the very early days of the war, now greatly expanded and upgraded. The Inchon landing, which he had scheduled for September 15, had become not so much a preferred battle plan as a MacArthur obsession. Almost from the moment the North Koreans had crossed the border and driven south, he had been thinking about it. There had been a staff meeting early in July, and a number of his people had been told to think in terms of an amphibious landing and make suggestions. Many sites were suggested: one staff officer had selected a port just behind North Korean lines; the next, a spot about ten kilometers north, still in artillery range of American troops. A third officer, a young major named Ed Rowny, was the boldest, suggesting a point about twenty-five kilometers up on the east coast. MacArthur was not impressed. "You're all pusillanimous," he said. Then he went to a blackboard and wrote out in French—Rowny remembered it clearly years later because it was the great MacArthur and a great performance, made even better by the unexpected use of the French—"De Qui Objet?" What is the object? And then he took a giant grease pencil and circled Inchon, the port for Seoul, well above what anyone else had suggested. "That's where we should land, Inchon—go for the throat." The younger men spoke about the difficulty of the tides and fears that the port's harbor might be mined, but MacArthur waved the objections aside. "Don't take counsel of your fears—it's simply a matter of willpower and courage." Then he told them to work out a plan for a landing at Inchon.

Now, with Harriman and Ridgway, he made his push for the landing. He normally would need four divisions for such an operation, but American forces being so strapped by the postwar demobilization, he would do it with two, the Seventh Infantry and the First Marines. It was, Ridgway thought, a brilliant presentation of a highly original strategy, and he enthusiastically supported it, becoming the first member of the senior Washington national security team to leap on the Inchon bandwagon. Ridgway had also been impressed by MacArthur's concern about the hardships that the upcoming Korean winter held in store for the troops, a winter much worse, he was sure, than anything they had encountered in Germany. The sooner they struck at Inchon, MacArthur said, the better. Once winter arrived, MacArthur had suggested, it would be so bitter and harsh that non-battle casualties might exceed battle ones. The irony of his argument, given the fact that in late November MacArthur would not hesitate to send the Eighth Army and Tenth Corps north to the Yalu in murderously cold weather, often still clothed in summer-w'eight uniforms, would not be lost later on either Harriman or Ridgway. MacArthur, they decided, could argue passionately on either side of any question—based on whether it suited his immediate purpose or not.

To Harriman, the originality of the Inchon landing presentation caught the great quandary posed to Chilian leaders by MacArthur, a man of two selves—such a talented, imaginative general, yet so difficult for his civilian bosses to deal with, an officer constantly bordering on the insubordinate, with an agenda always at variance with that of his superiors. Thev all knew that it was like a reflex action with him to hold back critical bits of information. How did you extract the best from a man who constantly seemed to create his own political undertow, simply did not play by the rules used by other senior military men, and was never even close to being straight with you? How could you employ him and yet control him? Could he, with all his talent, actually stay on your team? Harriman and Ridgway's trip had underlined the MacArthur problem perfectly; the mess he had created with Chiang, and the brilliance of the Inchon plan. In a casual remark that highlighted the dilemma MacArthur always posed for his civilian superiors, Harriman told Ridgway it was crucial "for political and personal considerations to be put to one side and our government deal with General MacArthur on the lofty level of the great national asset which he is." But even as their meeting proceeded in a positive vein, troubling signs for the future abounded. If the relationship between Moscow and Beijing, countries aligned as fraternal allies in the Communist constellation, was soon to prove uncommonly difficult, it would certainly be equaled by the thorny relationship between the American commander in Tokyo and his military and political superiors in Washington.

The Chilians knew that there was always going to be a next incident with MacArthur. In this case they didn't have to wait very long. It took fewer than three weeks. This time it was a VFW speech. The general had been asked to speak, or at least send a speech along to be read, to the annual meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, like the American Legion not a constituency of the dovish. Again the speech was about Taiwan. Its military value was not to be underestimated, he said. From Taiwan the United States "can dominate with air power every Asiatic port from Vladivostok to Singapore and prevent any hostile movement into the Pacific." It was in an odd way as if he were carrying ammunition for the nation's adversaries by going so public on so delicate a subject.

This—that Taiwan was a great military base for the Americans—was exactly the point the Russians, both for themselves and on behalf of the Chinese, were trying to make in the United Nations, and the point that Washington wanted to minimize in order to limit the scope of the Korean War. Then MacArthur went even further—he tweaked the administration one more time—speaking, it seemed, not so much as its most important commanding general in the field, but as one of its leading political critics at home. "Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia.... Those who speak thus do not understand the Orient. They do not grant that it is in the pattern of Oriental psychology to respect and follow aggressive, resolute and dynamic leadership." If it was not an assault on Truman himself, it was most obviously an all-out slap at Acheson.

Truman was once again furious. Though the speech was already public, and had been moved by the wire service, it had not yet been read to the VFW convention. Truman called in his top people and told Louis Johnson, who agreed with MacArthur on the subject, to tell MacArthur to withdraw the speech—and that it was a presidential order. "Do you understand that?" the president asked. "Yes, sir, I do," Johnson answered. "Go and do it, that's all," said the president (angry at Johnson as well, feeling that he was something of a co-conspirator in all this). But Johnson went back to his office and w*avered, not liking the idea of telling MacArthur to eat his own speech. He called Acheson and suggested ways of softening Truman's orders—as if what MacArthur had said was simply one man's opinion and every man was entitled to his opinion. Acheson reminded him that it was an order from Truman. All day long phone calls went back and forth among the various principals, except for Truman. Finally in mid-afternoon, Truman telephoned Johnson and dictated the message to MacArthur: "The President of the United States directs that you withdraw your message for the National Encampment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, because various features with respect to Formosa are in conflict with the policy of the U.S. and its position in the U.N." Finally it was withdrawn—now making MacArthur the angry one. But just as the speech had been made public and then withdrawn, the incident was over, but not over. Later, after MacArthur and Truman had their final clash and the president relieved him, Truman would sometimes mutter that he should have done it so much earlier, back at the time of the VFW speech.

It was the death knell for Louis Johnson, who was ordered by the president to resign some two weeks later. Johnson broke down in tears when Truman repeatedly told him to sign his farewell letter. Johnson was, wTote Truman's biographer, David McCullough, "possibly the worst appointment Truman ever made." "Nutty as a fruitcake," Acheson said of him. He had managed during his brief tour in office to offend almost everyone in the administration, including the president, the secretary of state, most cabinet members, and almost every senior military official whose path he crossed. The senior military men, often squabbling bitterly with one another over postwar roles, were united by a single common feeling in that time—they all hated Louis Johnson. He seemed to them a crude caricature of their worst nightmares of a civilian politician. He regularly denigrated their skills and the need for what they did. With the atomic bomb in mind, he wrote to one senior admiral in December 1949 (using what the writer Robert Heinl called his "characteristic tact"): "Admiral, the Navy is on its way out.... There's no reason for having a Navy or Marine Corps. General Bradley tells me amphibious landings are a thing of the past. We'll never have any more amphibious landings. That does away with the Marine Corps. And the Air Force can do anything the Navy can nowadays, so that does away with the Navy." He was hated in senior Army circles because of the pressures he kept applying to make a vastly diminished Army even smaller. By the time he was fired in September 1950, three months into the Korean War, a mordant joke was circulating in the Pentagon: the Joint Chiefs, it went, had informed Johnson that he could finally call off his relentless troop reduction demands-enough men were being killed in Korea every day to bring the Army's strength down to the desired level. He was despised by almost everyone who had to deal with him. "Unwittingly, Truman had replaced one mental case with another," Omar Bradley later wrote in his memoirs, in a reference to Forrestal.

But the fact that it had expedited Johnson's departure, almost guaranteed before the year was out anyway, was the least important part of the VFW-MacArthur contretemps. It had exacerbated the relationship between the president and the general, who had been forced to back down and respect a presidential order, a process that was as unpleasant as it was alien to him, and it was bound to fester. It was also a clear warning to the White House, like the visit to Taiwan, that MacArthur was a dissident, both hierarchically and politically. It showed that he was by no means in agreement with their policies in Asia, including potentially the aims in the war they were fighting, and that he was more than likely to be a serious opponent on an issue that had come to haunt them, that of China. That was no small fault line: the president and his secretary* of state wanted, if at all possible, to separate Korea from the larger issue of China, and the general, if he did not actually want to connect the two—and there is considerable evidence that he did, much of it from things he said, that he got down on his knees and prayed every night that China would enter the war—certainly was in no way bothered by the prospect of a Chinese entry.

To replace Johnson, Truman reached out for George Marshall, exhausted by his previous tours of duty, whose health was somew'hat shaky, and who was just a few months short of his seventieth birthday. Marshall had been hoping to slip into a semi-gentrified retirement as head of the Red Cross. Truman, sensing Johnson's fate, had already sent out a recon mission to see if Marshall might be willing to serve again. Marshall said he would serve, but only for six months, with Bob Lovett, a much respected figure in the national security world, coming in as his number two and then replacing him. Are you sure you really want me? Marshall had asked the president. The president might want to ponder, he said, "the fact that my appointment may reflect upon you and your Administration. They are still charging me with the downfall of Chiang's government in China. I want to help, not hurt you." Later, noting the conversation in a letter to his wife, Truman had written, "Can you think of anyone else saying that? I can't and he's one of the great?"

Even as the Korean War began, the death of one China and the birth of another hung over the administration—it was the issue from which the administration was beginning to hemorrhage. If in 1948 the Republicans had been in search of an issue, in 1949 their prayers were answered. The collapse of Chiang's regime would prove the first important step in what would eventually become a terrible collision between the United States and China on the battlefield itself a mere twenty months later. On November 3, 1948, the day before the presidential election, Chinese Nationalist forces retreated from Shenyang, the largest city in Manchuria, abandoning for the first time a major city (and control of much of the surrounding area) to Mao Zedong's Chinese Communists. The rout was on. Chiang Kai-shek's armies were in the process of a stunning collapse, each new defeat seeming to ensure that the next one would be bigger and come even more quickly. Sometimes entire Nationalist divisions surrendered and immediately became part of Mao's new army. Other divisions simply disappeared, leaving behind for their Communist enemies millions of dollars worth of American military equipment.

From then on, the United States and a new revolutionary China, sometimes seemingly deaf and dumb to each other's political and military impulses, would stumble in an awkward slow-motion dance toward an unwanted military collision. There had been plentiful signs of Chiang's decline over the previous four years, but because of the propaganda put out by so many journalists favorable to the regime, the end of his rule had still come as shattering news to millions of Americans. Beloved China, a country they had been told during World War ii was inhabited by industrious, obedient, trustworthy, good Asians (as Japan had only so recently been inhabited by wily, sneaky, untrustworthy, bad Asians), had suddenly gone Communist. First Russia, an ally during World War ii, had turned out to be an enemy; now, perhaps even more shattering, China had become an enemy as well, an ally of the Soviet Union.

For millions of Americans it felt like a betrayal, and a sinister one at that, because when China's immense land mass and population were added to Russia's enormous land mass and population, the world looked infinitely more dangerous. If both countries were colored pink on a giant geopolitical map of the world, which for political reasons they now often were, that map suddenly looked significantly more ominous. Because the emotions China generated among millions of Americans were greater than those generated by any comparable country, because the Democrats had won five elections in a row and the Republicans were looking for a new, hot issue, the political ramifications of the fall of China would prove staggering. The question now rising—an immensely partisan one—was: Who Lost China? Underlying it was the deeper assumption—and great historical misconception—that China had ever been ours; more, ours to lose. The fall of Chiang's China, though few understood it—or wanted to understand it—at the time, was part of the price of a dramatic alteration of the world's power structure that had taken place during six years of total war. World War II had been more than just the catastrophic struggle between two sides, the Allies and the Axis; like World War I, it would have far-reaching global consequences.

THE CHINA THAT existed in the minds of millions of Americans was the most illusory of countries, filled as it was with dutiful, obedient peasants who liked America and loved Americans, who longed for nothing so much as to be like them. It was a country where ordinary peasants allegedly hoped to be more Christian and were eager, despite the considerable obstacles in their way, to rise out of what Americans considered a heathen past. Millions of Americans believed not only that they loved (and understood) China and the Chinese, but that it was their duty to Americanize the Chinese. "With God's help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up until it is just like Kansas City," said Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, one of the Republicans who would become a particularly bitter critic of the administration for its China policies (and who once referred to French Indochina as Indigo-China).

Long before Chiang went to Taiwan, and established his rather personal China on location, there were two Chinas. There was China in the American public mind, a China as Americans wanted it to be, and the other China, the real China, which was coming apart and was the sad daily reality of those Americans on location. The illusory China was a heroic ally, ruled by the brave, industrious, Christian, pro-American Chiang Kai-shek and his beautiful wife, Mayling, a member of one of China's wealthiest and best connected families, herself Christian and American-educated, and who seemed to have been ordered up directly from Central Casting for a major public relations campaign. The goals of the Generalissimo and his lady, it always seemed, were exactly the same as America's goals, their values the same as ours as well. The reality of course was completely different. In a way, what happened after World War II was the cruelest of jokes: the impact of all those thousands of American missionaries who had so dutifully and faithfully gone to China over a century would be greater on the politics of their own country than it was on China, the country they hoped to change, and whose culture and politics they barely dented. Millions and millions of American children, as John Melby, one of the more talented members of the American embassy in China's wartime capital, Chongqing, later wrote, had faithfully brought their pennies to Sunday school to give to the poor and unwashed of China. Their parents had heard the missionaries, back on home leave, speak at their churches and evoke not just the marvels of China and the Chinese, but the vast challenge always still ahead for those who desired to do the Lord's work.

The China that existed in reality was a feudal country badly fragmented politically and geographically, a country of almost unbearable poverty, ruled more often than not by regional warlords of exceptional cruelty. It was a country of some 500 million people governed, if that was even the word, by a shaky, corrupt national administration, predatory foreign interests, an infinite number of warlords, and a tiny, self-serving oligarchy that also doubled as the government. To the leadership in much of the West, seeking as it did constant commercial benefits, a weak, vulnerable China was the preferred one. As the civil war continued, it reflected a historic attempt on China's part to redefine itself as a nation, one that would be truly whole, and perhaps even strong, and no longer, as it had been for so long, prey to powerful Western nations from afar and to warlords within. It had been torn apart by more than two decades of on-and-off civil war and by the brutality inflicted on its people during the Japanese occupation. It was a China burdened, now that World War II was over, with a sad, badly flawed leadership under Chiang, hardly equal to the Herculean challenges caused by such severe external and internal problems. It was, in historic terms, ripe for the picking.

There had, of course, been plenty of warnings that Chiang was going to fall. Even during World War II, when the main struggle was supposed to be against the Japanese, the battle between the Nationalists under Chiang and the Communists under Mao was a constant sideshow. Report after report coming in from the field during the war, from both civilians and military men, from men ideologically committed to Chiang as well as those appalled by him, had reflected the view that the Communists had better leadership, both political and military, and had far greater political legitimacy. Even as World War II was ending, very few people who had been there and knew what was happening militarily thought Chiang would make it. Some people in the national security team, like James Forrestal, thought Chiang's chances of winning were so slim that the United States had to be careful not to weaken Japan so much that it could not be used as a North Asian bulwark against the Communists. When World War II was finally over, and the civil war started in earnest, the reports from the field became even gloomier. Chiang had predictably turned inward, his base becoming ever more narrow, his policies ever more repressive. Even a figure as sympathetic to Chiang as Major General Claire Chennault, who had led the American Flying Tiger air units fighting in China during the world war and would be a lifelong hard-line supporter of the Generalissimo, had written Roosevelt near the war's end that if there was a civil war, as there was likely to be, "the Yenan regime [the Communists] has an excellent chance of emerging victorious with or without Russian aid."

Probably as good a date as any for the beginning of World War II is July 1937, when Chinese troops clashed with Japanese invaders near Beijing, close to the Chinese-Manchurian border. If nothing else, it surely ended any hope of the rise of a modern, semidemocratic China under Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist or Guomindang Party, the kind of China many Americans had hoped for, and dreamed of long after it became the most hopeless of causes. What then took place in China, under the dual force of the Japanese invasion and the constant undercurrent of the civil war, was as powerful and complete a transformation of a social, economic, and political order as the modern world had witnessed. It was a cataclysmic event, driven at first by forces from without, but in no way purely an external challenge. It was, at the same time, a challenge of one China, as yet unborn and potentially lethal in its norms and residual hatreds, to another China, at once weak, cruel, and barbaric in its own way: a challenge by one set of violent, autocratic men to another set of autocratic and ruthless men who had ruled so poorly and with such elemental brutality for too long. It was a system of oppression rather than authority that had been imposed with unparalleled harshness and greed upon ordinary Chinese. The few who benefited were rich, powerful, and lived above the laws, which, in any case, were set by force of arms. The many who were poor existed that way in what seemed like hopeless perpetuity. Every unbearable aspect of their daily lives was marked by some kind of injustice, and the absence of elemental dignity. This China was probably dying even before the first Japanese troops marched into Manchuria.

Chiang's own rise reflected the fragmentation of the older order. He was not so much a leader, as he was portrayed by favorable publications in America, as he was a survivor, a man who existed by balancing warring interests off against each other. His nickname among Westerners, as Barbara Tuchman pointed out in her book on the collapse of China, was "Billiken," after a popular weighted doll that could not be knocked over. He had strengthened his political ties in 1927 when he married into the Soong family, China's most influential family in terms of wealth and connections to powerful interests in the West. Mayling Soong, the youngest member of the family, was Christian, Wellesley-educated, and politically ambitious. Earlier, Chiang had tried to marry her older sister, the widow of China's first president, Sun Yat-sen, and had been rejected. To marry Mayling, he had to get rid of two other wives and convert to Christianity, something he readily did. In time, Chiang became known to the Americans as the Generalissimo or the Gimo, and she, not always affectionately, as Missimo. His marriage greatly strengthened his political connections with the United States and with those who longed for that most unrealistic of things, a modern, nationalist Chinese leader who was both Christian and capitalist.

Chiang's great struggle in those years was with the Communists, who had the good fortune to challenge authority but not to have to govern. All they had to do was exploit the country's myriad grievances and miseries. They did that with considerable skill, tuned brilliantly to the grievances of the peasants as Chiang and the warlords connected to him never had been. Chiang's China gradually imploded—despite vast amounts of American military aid and advice, despite all kinds of warnings, journalistic, diplomatic, and military, that he needed to change and reform his government. A series of American political and military advisers who urged him to use his resources more wisely failed dismally. Their interests and his interests were rarely the same—they wanted him to provide a kind of bold American-style leadership, and he wanted to survive for another day; the corrupt military-political structure the Americans wanted him to get rid of was nothing less than the key to his very political survival. If he had one special talent at the end, it was to appear to agree with his Americans advisers—he did not after all want to hurt their feelings—and then pay no attention to them whatsoever, and keep on doing exactly what he had always done.

When the government finally fell in 1949, there was no surprise involved. General Joseph (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell, the principal American military adviser assigned to work with Chiang during World War ii, had decided as early as 1942 that Chiang was utterly worthless, unwilling, if not unable, to use his army against the Japanese. Stilwell was hardly alone among Americans in the region in his distaste for Chiang. The Gimo's nickname among many American soldiers serving in China reflected their frustration with him; Chancre Jack, they called him. Stilwell might have done three tours of duty in China and might have spoken the language fluently, but he was hardly the ideal American representative to deal with so weak a regime and so fragile a leader. He was the least diplomatic of men, edgy, outspoken, cantankerous, and blasphemous; he could be, wrote his biographer Barbara Tuchman, who in many ways admired him, "rude or caustic or sometimes coarse or deliberately boorish." He said what he thought, without much reflection, or tact. There was no difference between his private view of the Chinese leader and what he told any and all who listened to him. He had decided early on that Chiang was virtually useless as an instrument of American policy. Once, the young Time magazine reporter Teddy White had asked Stilwell for an explanation of the debacle of Chinese troops during a battle, and he answered, "We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, peasant son of a bitch called Chiang Kai-shek." A more accurate description might have been that the United States was failing because it was trying overnight to create a China that was in America's image, something very unlikely to take place. Any leader the United States chose would end up failing either his own people or America or, as happened in this case, both. The reality failed because the dream was impossible from the start.

Stilwell regularly reported back to Washington that Chiang was hopeless as a military ally, unable or unwilling to take any of the requisite steps to get his army to engage the Japanese. But in Washington, Stilwell's reports did not greatly matter. Even though the then Army chief of staff, George Marshall, Stilwell's personal sponsor, was on his side, Chiang always held a better hand. On his side was the one person who mattered most, Franklin Roosevelt, who feared that if Chiang were pushed too hard, he might make a separate peace with the Japanese, allowing them to move armies bogged down for so long in China to other areas of Asia. As the war dragged on, the attitude of Chiang and the people around him toward their Western allies, most particularly the Americans, lapsed into one of utter and complete cynicism. As Barbara Tuchman later wrote of his policy, "To use barbarians to fight other barbarians was a traditional principle of Chinese statecraft, which now more than ever appeared not only advisable, but justified. Chinese opinion, according to a foreign resident, held that not only was China justified in remaining passive after five years of resistance, 'it was her right to get as much as possible out of her allies while they fought.' The exercise of this right, she noted, became the Government's chief war effort."

Chiang's army was a mighty one—on paper. In reality, it was increasingly a sham. He allegedly commanded three hundred divisions, but Stilwell believed they were, on average, at least 40 percent understrength, filled with invisible or ghost soldiers kept on the rolls so that their commanders could draw and personally pocket their pay. Early in World War II, when China was allegedly fighting for its life, American advisers were simply appalled by the conscription process. A senior American officer on Stilwell's staff, Colonel Dave Barrett, wrote of one engagement, "The troops had only the poorest equipment. No medical attention. No transport. Many sick. Most recruits were conscripts delivered tied up. Conscription is a scandal. Only the unfortunates without money or influence are grabbed." The numerous, large, incompetent divisions did not exist by happenstance; they were Chiang's way of buying influence in a corrupt, feudal world already collapsing around him. If he had done what the Americans wanted, he understood far better than they, he might quickly have fallen from power.

Long, bitter, and divisive as it was, the Stilwell-Chiang struggle could have only one outcome: in the fall of 1944, Stilwell, the teller of so many unwanted truths, had thus become the most unwelcome of guests, and was recalled. Roosevelt had chosen to go with Chiang, even though he was a hopelessly flawed instrument of American policy. There were two reasons for this: first, it kept China in the war; and second, Roosevelt had his own hopelessly romantic vision of China, and seemed to believed that if we treated Chiang as the great leader of a great nation, brought him as a high-level leader to some of the conferences among the world's leaders, he would in time morph into what the president wanted.

If Chiang had succeeded politically in the two-man game with Stilwell, that did not make the American general any less of a prophet. Everything he had said came true; the ever more ferocious downward spiral of Chiang's government was nothing less than a profound historical process, the collapse of a nation outside the control of any foreigners, no matter how rich and powerful their own country. No wartime military man had been more successful in a variety of exhausting tasks than George Marshall, but sent on a mission to China in late 1945 to mediate the struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists, he was a study in unadulterated failure—and was all too aware of that fact, for he was much too shrewd a figure not to understand that neither side was going to listen to him, and that the forces he was dealing with were irreconcilable. Marshall was sixty-five at the time and had just retired from the Army, physically exhausted and wanting nothing so much as to become a country squire in Leesburg, Virginia. But Harry Truman, badly shaken by events in China and fearing what the China issue might represent domestically if matters did not improve, had called on him: "General, I want you to go to China for me." So it was that just before Christmas, 1945, John Carter Vincent, the head of Far Eastern Affairs at State, saw Marshall off. He then turned to his ten-year-old son as the plane departed: "Son," he said, "there goes the bravest man in the world. He's going to try and unify China."

The trip was such a disaster that Marshall seemed to age visibly in front of his own aides. He seemed, John Melby, who did some of the translating for him, wrote in his diary, very tired, very sad, and most likely quite ill. It was as if he saw the failure that was coming in China and the toxins it would create in the American political system. At one point in May 1946, he ran into Dwight Eisenhower, also in China. At Truman's request, Eisenhower sounded Marshall out about replacing Jimmy Byrnes as secretary of state, an enormous responsibility for a man already worn down by prolonged public service. "Great goodness, Eisenhower, i'd take any job in the world to get out of this one!" Marshall quickly answered. Hearing of the failure of the Marshall mission, Joe Stilwell said, "But what did they expect? George Marshall can't walk on water." To Marshall, China was hopeless. The one tiling he wanted to do more than anything else was to prevent American combat troops from being sent there to support Chiang, as some of the Nationalist leaders wanted. As he told Walton Butterworth, who became head of the State Department's Far Eastern Affairs Office in 1947, "Butterworth, we must not get sucked in. i would need 500,000 troops to begin with and it would just be the beginning." Then he paused and added: "And how would i extricate them?"

Yet for all of the sense that those people knowledgeable about China had of the rot that had set in, as World War ii ended, outsiders could be forgiven for thinking that Chiang's position still seemed enviable. He retained the support of the new American administration, though its most influential members doubted his viability. He was a recognized world leader; and the portrait most Americans had of him, thanks to the efforts of a brilliant propaganda machine, was of a great and sympathetic Asian leader. In the fall of 1945 his army, and his party, the Guomindang, controlled all of China's major cities, its entire—if devastated—industrial base, and more than three-quarters of its total population, then variously estimated at between 450 and 500 million people. He had more than 2.5 million men officially under arms, and those arms were relatively modern, having been provided by the United States.

The Communists had fewer than half that number of men under arms and ruled over only an impoverished rural area of northwest China. Yet all kinds of foreign and domestic observers, civilian and military alike, believed that Chiang's strength was a complete illusion and that the government was on the verge of collapse. The finances of the country were a joke. It was for a small handful of people a kind of golden trough, so much money flowing into the country to be handled by so very few Chinese. Clearly it was a situation that might not last long, and it was a time to make as much money as you could as quickly as possible. Critics of the government talked openly of key officials storing away bars of gold for their own future security. Marshall had warned Chiang almost on arrival that far too much of the country's budget—between 80 and 90 percent—was going to the military, and that financial collapse would come before military victory. If the Chinese government, he told some of Chiang's ministers, thought the American taxpayers would "step into the vacuum this creates, you can go to hell." As that became more obvious, the government's only response was to print more currency—"printing press money," as it was known.

Yet Chiang had little sense of his own vulnerability. Now, with the Japanese defeated, he still believed he held the whip hand over the Americans, prepared as he was to fight that country's newest enemy, the Communists. Typically, T.V. Soong, probably the most powerful (and richest) man in the government, was openly contemptuous of the Americans. He went around Nanjing telling Chinese colleagues not to worry about them. "I can take care of these boobs," he said. Certainly, the Americans seemed ready to play their part as scripted by Chiang. Even as the Japanese were surrendering, the United States had managed to turn their forces into a kind of temporary constabulary, staying in place, weapons in hand, until Nationalist, not Communist, troops arrived to accept their surrender. Then the Americans helped airlift or ferry as many as five hundred thousand Nationalist troops from southwestern China to key positions around the country. ("Unquestionably the largest troop movement by air in the world's history," boasted General Albert Wedemeyer, who directed it as the senior American military officer in the region in the post-Stilwell era.) In a number of places in northeast China, the United States sent detachments of their own Marines in, perhaps as many as fifty thousand all told, to hold outposts until the Nationalist troops could arrive. As such, with the help of the United States, Chiang's forces were able to accept the surrender of some 1.2 million Japanese soldiers, along with their equipment, much of it desperately coveted by the Communists.

Yet even when the civil war w^ras apparently going well, the truth was very different. No one w^ras more aware of this than the former American chief of staff. In October 1946, near the end of his tour as Truman's special representative, George Marshall repeatedly warned Chiang not to go after the Communists in their bases in the north and northwest. Chiang was spreading himself much too thin and playing into Mao's hands, Marshall argued. In addition, sensing the kind of war the Communists fought, he tried to make one basic point with the Gimo. The Communists might be retreating, but they were not surrendering. The implications were obvious: when the Nationalists were far from their base camps and supply lines, then, and only then, would the Communist forces strike. Chiang, of course, did not listen. He never did. He was pumped up on victories that were not victories, on the departure of Communist forces from projected battlefields, which was part of the larger Communist strategy. Chiang promised Marshall that he would destroy the Communists in eight to ten months, and then, having rejected all of his advice, he asked Marshall, the most distinguished American citizen-soldier of his generation, a man exhausted and desperate for retirement, to stay on as his personal military adviser. Marshall quite emphatically said no—if he could not influence Chiang as the personal representative of the president of the United States, he knew what chance he would have on Chiang's own payroll. ("Chiang's confidence in me may have been unbounded, but it did not restrain him from disregarding my advice," Marshall said years later, somewhat mordantly.)

For all of Chiang's surface strengths, the Communists at that moment could not have been more confident. They might have been pushed back into the caves of impoverished Yenan, but they had been surprisingly successful in their guerrilla strikes against the Japanese, and even more successful in their efforts to forge a deep relationship with China's vast peasant population. Aware of the mounting problems of the Nationalists, they were absolutely confident of their own destiny and their inevitable victory, and sooner rather than later. In America, powerful religious leaders, men of deep faith, were outraged by the possibility of their victory, but in their own very different way the Communists were men of faith, politics and war having been entwined together into what was virtually a religious fervor, a certainty on their part that they were a force of destiny. For Mao and the men around him were designing what seemed at the time a new kind of war, based initially not so much on force of arms as on gaining the support of the people.

CHIANG HAD BARELY waited for the world war to end before launching his offensive against the Communists, who had hoped that he would do exactly that, would come after them and extend his line of communications. American aid continued to pour in. It was as if he were following an agenda that the Communists had scripted for him. "It is all right for United States to arm the Guomindang, because as fast as they get it we will take it away from them," a Communist representative said at the time. All told, the United States sent $2.5 billion in aid to China from the end of World War II to 1949, when Chiang fled to Taiwan. Indeed, so much military aid had been wasted and stolen during the war that some of the Americans who flew the equipment over the Hump—that is, the Himalayas—from India, an unusually dangerous supply mission given that era's aircraft, had a cynical phrase for it all: "Uncle Chump from over the Hump."

On paper, the Communist Army was at first comparatively small and poorly armed, but they had leadership, discipline, and grievance. They had come to their combat skills and their strategy the hard way. First there had been the Long March, the 6,000-mile, 370-day trek from southern China to Yenan that had begun in October 1934 and that, among other things, had seen the rise of Mao Zedong within the Party. Then there had been the long ordeal of struggling to survive against the Japanese during the war years, which had provided them with a form of warfare that perfectly suited their strengths and minimized their weaknesses. They had fought the Japanese with great skill, using mobile, small-unit guerrilla tactics, striking only when they had overwhelming numerical strength and vanishing when the enemy units were larger and stronger. Now, pursued by larger, better-armed Nationalist forces, they made comparable adjustments on what was a changing battlefield, a battlefield they redesigned to suit their purposes, rather than those of their enemy. They would not hold cities, and they would not fight a stationary war; they would operate out of bases that were so distant as to be almost unreachable by conventional forces. In the beginning they would seek more than anything simply to capture weapons from the Nationalist troops. Sixty years later, when American forces would fight in Iraq against urban guerrillas, there was a new name for it—an asymmetrical war.

Despite the vulnerability of their positions in 1945, the morale of the Communists was high. It was not long before a sense of a changing military dynamic was obvious to foreign observers. John Melby, one of the younger State Department officials, noted in his diary as early as December 1945, "One of the great mysteries to me is why one group of people retains faith, whereas another from much the same origins and experience loses it. Over the years the Communists have absorbed an incredible amount of punishment, have been guilty of their own share of atrocities, and yet have retained a kind of integrity, faith in their destiny, and the will to prevail. By contrast the Guomindang has gone through astonishing tribulations, has committed its excesses, has survived a major war with unbelievable prestige, and is now throwing everything away at a frightening rate, because the revolutionary faith is gone and has been replaced by the smell of corruption and decay."

Almost from the start the Communist tactics succeeded, while those of the Nationalists failed. In the fall of 1946, as the civil war intensified, Chiang's American advisers were pessimistic, but being traditional military men, if anything they overestimated the value of American military gear in a war like this and underestimated how successful yet simple the Communist order of battle was. They imagined Chiang's forces ultimately mired in another protracted struggle, eventually leading to an uneasy stalemate, perhaps with a geographic division of the country, the Communists getting the north and the Nationalists the south. They did not understand the particular dynamic of a political war like this, that the forces and the balance would not stay static. Once the dynamic no longer favored the Nationalists—and that happened with surprising speed—it would favor the Communists at an ever accelerating pace. "No one anticipated the speed and skill with which the Chinese Communists would be able to transfer their anti-Japanese guerrilla campaign into campaigns of mobile warfare," wrote John Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker in their Cambridge History of China.

Actually, one person had. In the days when Chiang's forces were at their strongest and had attained some early successes, Mao had not lost his faith, nor his essential belief that his forces were infinitely closer to the average peasant than Chiang's. In the summer of 1946, when there was a brief armistice, Robert Payne, a distinguished British historian, visited Mao in his redoubt in Yenan. Near the end of a prolonged interview, Mao, clearly tired, asked if there were any more questions. "One more," Payne answered. "How long would it take for the Chinese Communists to conquer China if the armistice breaks down?" "A year and a half," Mao answered. It was said, Payne noted, slowly and with absolute conviction, and it proved surprisingly accurate. By mid-1948, the war was virtually over and Chiang's forces were in almost complete retreat. But at the time it had seemed like the wildest of boasts.

At first there had been, on the surface at least, some apparent Nationalist victories; some cities and towns were recaptured from the Communists. But whether they were victories or not was always a question—they might have been part of a larger Communist strategy' of bait and wait. The Nationalists took cities and then remained stationary; the Communists had to move constantly and were highly mobile. The Communists learned to be nimble, to move quickly at night. They perfected the art of the ambush. They used tactics "of feint and deceit that seemed to place them everywhere and nowhere," as one American historian noted. Often they would feint a frontal assault against a Nationalist unit while keeping their main force at the rear in well-prepared positions, ready to inflict a brutal pounding on the retreating—and terrified—Nationalist troops (a tactic they would employ again with some significant success against the Americans in the early days of the Korean War). They would often strike at night, when the Nationalists were least prepared. Because of their connection with the peasants, and because their men had often infiltrated Chiang's units, they had excellent intelligence. They seemed to know every move the Nationalists were going to make. When the Communists lost men in combat, they were able, because of their superior political skills, to recruit more quite readily from their abundant local peasant base.

By May 1947, Chiang's offensive had ground to a halt. His poorly led forces, spread too thin, their supply lines too extended, were bottled up in cities, their morale dropping almost daily. They had become bogged down and vulnerable before their commanders even realized it. By the end of the summer of 1947, Mao and his people estimated that of his 248 brigades Chiang had committed 218 to his offensive and had already lost over 97 of them, or nearly 800,000 men. Some Americans, even back in the United States, were becoming frustrated with Chiang. "Why, if he is a generalissimo, doesn't he generalize?" asked an angry Senator Tom Connally, the Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Communists were getting very little aid from the Russians—a source of eventual tension between Mao and Stalin. By contrast, the Nationalists had become ever more dependent on the Americans. That they were turning over American-made weapons to their enemies at what the Americans thought was an alarming rate did not seem to bother them—the solution was to ask for more. In the middle of 1947, Wellington Koo, the very well-connected, extremely supple Nationalist ambassador to Washington, dropped in on George Marshall, by then secretary of state. The frustrated Marshall, sick of what Chiang's armies were doing in the field, and equally sick of the political problems that men like Koo were causing for the administration in Washington, told Koo that Chiang "was the worst advised military commander in history." That did not stop Koo from asking for more weapons. "He is losing about 40 percent of his supplies to the enemy," Marshall told Koo and added sardonically, "If the percentage should reach 50 percent he will have to decide whether it is wise to continue to supply his troops." Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao would later comment laconically, "was our supply officer." When Weifang and Jinan fell in 1948, David Barr, the last American senior military adviser to Chiang's army, added, "The Communists had more of our equipment than the Nationalists did."

With the Manchurian city of Shenyang about to fall in late October 1948, Colonel Dave Barrett, the assistant military attache, and John Melby went to the airport in the capital, Nanjing, hoping to hop a plane north to survey the contested areas. But no planes were going north. They had all been commandeered to bring out the Nationalist generals, their girlfriends, and their personal wealth. Barrett turned to Melby: "John, i've seen all i need to see. When the generals begin to evacuate their gold bars and their concubines, the end is at hand." That so obvious and sad a collapse of a regime was taking place was one thing; what made the political situation back in America much more dangerous and explosive was all the extremely influential people who for a variety of political reasons and loyalties refused to tell the truth when they were back in America, or who tempered their reporting to make it seem that America had failed Chiang, rather than that Chiang had failed himself, his people, and his ally. What infuriated John Melby and many of the people trying to report honestly on the fall of Chiang was the duplicity of various American figures, who spoke one way about Chiang and why he was failing when they were in China; then, on return to the United States, feeling the domestic pro-Chiang political pressure, switched their line, refused to find fault with him, and became powerful voices for the China Lobby, placing all blame for his failures on the administration and the State Department's China Hands, who had been warning of Chiang's flaws and a future Communist victory. It was as if there was one truth that you told in China, when you were surrounded by other Americans and Chinese who knew how pathetically Chiang's forces had fought, and another you told back in the States, surrounded by conservative friends who wanted their truths reinforced.

The symbol of it, in Melby's view, was the performance of General Albert Wedemeyer. In the summer of 1947, George Marshall, delighted to be out of China, had sent Wedemeyer, an old friend of Chiang's, on a fact-finding mission. Generally considered an exceptionally able staff officer, Wedemeyer was a fierce anti-Communist, so it was a calculated risk on Marshall's part, reflecting his belief that Wedemeyer's ideology would be subordinated to his sense of reality. The Wedemeyer trip also represented a shrewd hope on Marshall's part that the reactions of someone as conservative and pro-Chiang as Wedemeyer, after confronting the terrible reality on the ground in China, might help lessen right-wing pressure on the administration. In fact, the Wedemeyer visit did work in the short run, but in the long run it backfired. Within a few days of his arrival, Wedemeyer cabled Marshall that the Nationalists were "spiritually insolvent." The people had lost confidence in their leadership. By contrast, he noted, the Communists had "excellent spirit, almost a fanatical fervor." The government, he decided, was "corrupt, reactionary, and inefficient." Later, asked what had gone wrong with Chiang's cause, Wedemeyer said, "Lack of spirit, primarily lack of spirit. It was not lack of equipment. In my opinion they could have defended the Yangtze with broomsticks if they had the will to do it."

On August 22, 1947, just before Wedemeyer's return home, he was scheduled to speak to a meeting of Nationalist ministers. He had been told by his old friend Chiang to be blunt, but the Gimo, playing a dual game, as he often did, had promptly called John Leighton Stuart, the American ambassador, and suggested Wedemeyer should speak carefully and not be too critical of the Chinese Army. Stuart, however, told Wedemeyer that time was running out and there should be no more niceties. As such, Wedemeyer was brutally blunt. The government, he said, had little support among the people; its failures had allowed the Communists to succeed; it was spiritually bankrupt. It was a devastating moment. One top Chinese official openly wept. The next night a farewell dinner had been scheduled at Stuart's residence. But at the last minute, the Gimo canceled, claiming illness. Missimo, however, would come. Wedemeyer did not need that, so he canceled the dinner.

But soon, back in America, the dedicated anti-Communist Wedemeyer reappeared, pushing the China Lobby line that Chiang had been brought down by a lack of aid and by treachery within the American mission. In December 1947, he went before the Senate Appropriations Committee, where the chairman, Styles Bridges, himself an important player in the China Lobby, asked him about Chiang. The Gimo was, Wedemeyer said, "a fine character, and you gentlemen on this committee would admire him and respect him." Was it urgent, Bridges pressed, to send more military supplies to him? Wedemeyer, who while in China had recommended no further commitment of aid, answered in the affirmative. And did Wedemeyer think the United States had kept its promises to Chiang over the years? "No sir, i do not." The reality and politics of China were clearly different from the reality and politics of Washington.

The end in China came surprisingly quickly. On November 5, 1948, three days after Harry Truman's surprise victory in the presidential election, the embassy in Nanjing advised all Americans in China to leave. At virtually the same time, Mao was warned by Anastas Mikoyan, special envoy from the ever cautious Joseph Stalin, not to let his armies cross the Yangtze River into southern China too hastily, lest it provoke the Americans to enter the Chinese civil war. On January 21, 1949, Chiang turned over nominal control of the Nationalist government to proxies and moved with his gold reserves to Taiwan, making himself into, as a State Department bulletin put it, "a refugee on a small island off the coast of China," having thrown away "greater military power than any ruler had ever had in the history of China." On April 21, 1949, Mao's forces crossed the Yangtze River. Three days later, they took Nanjing, the Nationalist capital. The end was now in sight.

Truman, Acheson, and Marshall had been aware since 1947 of what they wanted in China, a systematic disengagement, with as little participation in the ongoing civil war as possible, and of course with as little domestic political blowback as possible. Like the fall of the tsarist regime during World War i, Chiang's collapse was driven by powerful historic forces far beyond the influence of American policy: a country that was already rotting and barely held together, crushed by the additional weight of a cataclysmic world war. There was, however, a significant difference between the collapse of tsarist Russia and that of Nationalist China. There had never been a powerful Russian lobby in America to mobilize American opinion in the years after the collapse of the Romanov family. The Russian Orthodox Church, to the extent that it existed in the United States, was not connected personally to ordinary Americans as the churches of Protestant and Catholic missionaries to China were. Russia had never been considered America's, and thus could not be lost by America, whereas China was America's, and thus had been lost by America.

And so the fall of Chiang left a gaping opening in the American political fabric. On the domestic political front no one was interested in talking about the tragic inevitability of it. What the administration wanted was some time so that Truman might one day be able to deal with the new Chinese leaders and see if they could be at least partially separated from Moscow. Out of that might have come a new policy that could eventually have ended with the recognition of Mao's China, something, it was then mistakenly believed, that Mao and the others in his government badly wanted. It was not to be.

The COLLAPSE OF Chiang's China quickly became a defining American political issue. Normally the failure of a regime like that would have made only a modest blip in American politics. But this was a different time. After Chiang finally fell in 1949, much was written about how the United States had betrayed him. The reporting on the coming collapse had been spotty and at least partially politicized: Chiang had powerful allies in American journalism, like Harry Luce, and Roy Howard of the Scripps Howard chain, who had effectively censored the news filed by their correspondents.

The issue was perfect for the Republicans. Chiang's failure was an obvious manifestation of the issue of subversion that they had decided to use after Dewey's defeat. The fact that Chiang ended up on Taiwan made it an issue that would never go away. Ironically, those who had correctly warned that Chiang was not going to make it found themselves on the defensive, accused of undercutting him because they were leftists. The State Department's China Hands were quickly scattered and hidden away in places as distant as possible, lest their careers be damaged even more for having reported accurately. The one important military man who might have made the case of Chiang's failures, Joe Stilwell, had died in October 1946. The administration found itself in a particularly difficult bind: its Republican critics were shrewdly connecting Chiang to the issue that was paramount for Truman and Acheson, collective security in Europe. Truman and Acheson would not be able to get what they wanted for the Marshall Plan to rebuild a shattered Western Europe unless they compromised on China, their policies in Europe effectively held hostage to the approval of their enemies on China.

The administration was very quickly losing the propaganda battle, and so the political battle as well. When, in 1949, Acheson authorized the State Department to put together and make public a China White Paper, a definitive documentary history of how Chiang had failed despite vast amounts of American aid, it proved to be a failure on both sides of the Pacific. In the United States, it was regarded as one last kick administered to a faltering regime, and enraged the China Lobby; in China, Mao seized on it as incontestable evidence—produced by the Americans themselves—that America had constantly worked against his China. It was proof positive the Americans were the enemies of China.

So the administration had played the game out, going through the motions of aiding Chiang, knowing nothing good could possibly come of it, only in order nor to have U.S. fingerprints on the eventual collapse that the Americans were certain was coming. That was true not just of the Democrats, but of some of the Republicans as well. In 1948, when Bourke Hickenlooper, a conservative Iowa senator, went to Arthur Vandenberg, his political leader, to ask him if a $570 million China aid bill would really do any good, Vandenberg answered, as Thomas Christensen has written, "At least the China collapse would not be placed on the shoulders of the American government." What was important, Vandenberg said, was popular opinion, which greatly favored aid even to a dying China—"We are undertaking to resist Communist aggression, and we are ignoring one area completely and letting it completely disintegrate without even a gesture of assistance."

THE END CAME, but the end was not the end, for political reasons. The United States could not disengage as it wanted to, because Chiang's political constituency in America had become far too powerful. Without either side understanding it, the United States and Mao's China had already begun moving almost inexorably toward a military collision.

If the administration was being attacked back home for doing too little, then in Beijing, in the new China, it was being denounced for having given too much to help save Chiang. In the eyes of Mao and his colleagues, America's acts were not innocent. In their view, U.S. fingerprints had been everywhere on the civil war. The Americans had financed Chiang from 1941 to 1949. U.S. planes and naval transports had ferried his troops to the northern reaches of China in 1945 to take the Japanese surrender. Neutral observers did not do that. In American minds, it was a small bit of help, the minimal the United States could really do—but to Mao and his top people it was egregious interference in their country and in their war. To them, America had acted exactly the way a rich capitalist nation was expected to act.

Out of all of this had come an emboldened new force in American politics, the China Lobby. It was a loose alliance of people brought together for very different reasons. It connected powerful, shrewd, and extremely wealthy members of Chiang's own family, often working in Washington or there on special assignment, to influential conservative American political and journalistic allies and friends. It was at once amorphous, and yet all too real, and highly focused. It was influential, for a variety of reasons, far beyond its numbers. It became in its time the most powerful lobby that had ever operated for a foreign power in Washington. What it wanted initially was fairly simple: massive aid to Chiang for as long as possible. In the late 1940s, in the ever more likely event that the Communists won, it wanted the United States to continue to view Chiang's regime as China, and to block any recognition on Washington's part of Mao's regime; it wanted to keep the new China out of the UN; and finally it wanted to sustain aid to Chiang on Taiwan. What this lobby wanted, now that Chiang had lost the war, was for the United States to act as if he had actually won the war. What they really hoped for someday was an unlikely cataclysm that might send Chiang's forces triumphantly back to the mainland under an American banner; something, say, like a war between the United States and China.

The people in the China Lobby came together in some cases because of a genuine love of China as it once had been—at least in their imaginations—and a belief that somehow Chiang for all his myriad faults was its only possible leader if it was challenged by the Communists. In other cases, the reasons for supporting the Generalissimo were ignoble and hopelessly selfish, sometimes little more than the fact that working for the Chinese Nationalists often paid so well. For a good many people, seizing on the issue was a chance to get even after a prolonged period of Democratic Party hegemony. Some, like Congressman Walter Judd, who had been a medical missionary as a young man, or like Henry Luce, the son of a missionary, were not merely China Firsters, but Chiang Firsters, men who believed as an article of faith that the one great truth of this struggle was that Chiang and China were one and the same. Many of them had no love for the Europe First policies that had dominated American foreign policy for so long and were looking to shift America's essential anti-Communist focus to the Pacific, where they felt our future lay.

For the China Firsters who had grown up in China as the children of missionaries, that country's pull was deep and unrelenting; China was in some ways as much their home and their native country as the United States was. In addition, to say that Chiang had failed was to say that their own parents, who had devoted their lives to bringing Christianity to China, had been failures (as indeed, in at least the narrow sense of their mission, they had failed). In the fall of 1946, on one of his trips to China, Luce had been engaged by John Melby, who suggested that his singular commitment to Chiang rather than to China was a mistake. Luce immediately rejected Melby's suggestion with an exceptionally revealing answer. "You've got to remember," he answered, "that we were born here. This is all we've ever known. We had made a lifetime commitment to the advancement of Christianity in China. And now you're attacking us for it. You're asking us to say that all our lives have been wasted; they've been futile. They've been lived for nothing. That's a pretty tough thing to ask of anyone isn't it?" It was, Melby agreed, but it had to be done because the world and China had changed, because the China they knew was dying.

But it was that kind of passion—and nostalgia—that fueled no small amount of the success of the China Lobby. Much of the political activity was initially directed out of the Chinese embassy in Washington and, for a time near the end in 1948, when Madame Chiang came to this country for an extended stay, from her brother-in-law's home in Riverdale, New York. Chiang's two brothers-in-law, T. V. Soong and H. H.

Kung (as well as Wellington Koo, the ambassador in Washington), were very good at the game they were playing. T. V. Soong had once warned John Paton Davies, a talented foreign service officer, and one of the ablest of the China Hands, that there was no State Department memo sent from China that he did not have access to within two or three days. These top Nationalists sometimes seemed to understand how Washington worked better than their American counterparts did, and they had allies throughout the government, a number of powerful Republican senators and even a few renegade Democrats, like Pat McCarran of Nevada. Certainly, though, their greatest ally, the most important man to the lobby, the one who brought a group of people who otherwise might be considered on the fringe of politics and gave them and their cause far greater legitimacy, was not a politician at all, but the most important publisher of the era, Henry Luce.

No one was more critical to the pro-Chiang alliance than Luce—he gave it a national voice perceived as coming from the political center rather than the far right, and he worked hard to suppress any views contrary to his own. Since he was the most partisan of men, and a passionate Republican—"my second church" he called the party—liberal Democrats were always going to be on the defensive in his universe. Some of the other China Firsters had little political respectability, but Luce could manage to change the political balance and to cast doubts on centrists whose more realistic views on what was happening in China he abhorred. Few of the others in the China Lobby were his normal political allies; more often than not they were isolationists, and he was quite possibly the leading Republican internationalist of that time, and thus their sworn enemy at the Republican conventions of 1940, 1944, 1948, and in time, 1952. But he went after anyone who might oppose him on China with ferocity, crushing without hesitation whomever got in his way. He savaged careers—political, diplomatic, and journalistic—without much anguish, or worry about normal moral or journalistic ethics. Those who suffered because of what his magazines wrote deserved their fate, he believed, for straying from his truth, disagreeing with him, or getting in his way.

He was the son of missionary parents in China, brilliant, unusually awkward socially, with a great raw intelligence and a restless natural curiosity. At Hotchkiss, his prep school, and then at Yale, he had been a poor boy, out of step with everyone, always a bit too eager, his parents not connected to the parents of his elite classmates. He always wore the wrong clothes, outdated American styles from a very distant era, copied faithfully in heavy fabric by Chinese tailors. "Chink Luce" was his nickname, a most unwanted one. He once told the novelist Pearl Buck how he had hated prep school and college, because he had felt so different and so poor. As a publisher ever more successful, he became steadily more sure of his truths, chief among them his vision of what America could and should be in the twentieth century, the inventor as it were of the rather heady concept of the American Century. He was an odd mixture of parts that did not seem to mesh perfectly: the Calvinist as journalist; and yet when it came to those who opposed his ideas, he was more like a brutal Chinese warlord who took no prisoners. Early in his journalistic career he had not seemed that interested in rekindling his China connection; it had been very painful and he was busy shedding it, becoming more American than the native sons he had failed to charm at school. But in 1932, at the age of thirty-four, already a stunning success as an editor and publisher, he visited China and the connection was renewed. The Soong family, the wealthiest in China (and perhaps soon the world, because of American aid), played to him skillfully; they were far more adroit in manipulating powerful Westerners, saying all the right things and getting what they wanted, than Westerners were in playing them. He decided in those fateful days that all of China might become a nation of people just like this remarkable family: sophisticated, Christian, capitalist, and seemingly grateful—and that the task of bringing China to this wondrous new incarnation and away from its cruel, heathen past was now nothing less than the mission of America in the American Century. He had left China after that visit with his greatest cause.

The administration had been on the defensive about China and subversion from almost the moment World War II ended. At home Truman, under pressure from the right, toughened the government's loyalty and security procedures. In foreign affairs, the China Hands were now conveniently blamed for the very events they had warned were about to take place. In retrospect they would be viewed as one of the most brilliant and talented groups of foreign service officers the State Department ever sent to a foreign venue. But starting in the mid-iQ40s, off they were packed to Liverpool and Dublin and Switzerland and Peru and British Columbia and Norway and New Zealand. Ray Ludden, one of the more talented of them, went in short order from Dublin to Brussels to Paris to Stockholm—anywhere but Asia. "From 1949 on I was just putting in my time," he once said. "I couldn't get a job as dog-catcher." In time their personal tragedies became their country's tragedy, as the government made itself blind in an area that would become so important—and where it was critically important, because the forces at play were so volatile and revolutionary, to separate what you did not like from what threatened you. None of the China Hands was a real player in October 1950 when American forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel heading north, and none would be a player when the key Vietnam decisions were made some fifteen years later.

In the beginning, the purge had been aimed at relatively low-and middle-level officials, but by 1948, the China Lobby people were desperate, ready and willing to go after bigger game. And perhaps the best way of understanding that period when the political debate became so bitter and ugly is to consider that the China Lobby leadership next chose to turn its energies against George Catlett Marshall. He had been a friend of China as a young man, had served there as a young officer, and had always retained that sense of friendship, so that when Madame Chiang came to the United States in late 1948 to plead her case both in Washington and with the American public, she had stayed with the Marshalls in Virginia. Marshall had turned away from Chiang reluctantly, not out of personal pique but because it was so obvious that his China was dying and could not be resuscitated and because Marshall placed the interests of the United States above those of Chiang. It was, he understood, the most fateful and difficult of decisions—giving up on an ally and accepting as the victor in the Chinese civil war an alien, hostile leadership likely to make the world a more difficult and dangerous place. That his patriotism was now under attack because of Chiang's collapse told more about the era than about Marshall himself.

In 1945, when World War II had ended, if there was one American who seemed to stand above any partisan issue and to have earned the gratitude of the entire nation it was George Marshall, the most selfless and least ideological of men, "the great one of the age," in Truman's admiring words. He had, by then, been the primary architect of America's amazingly quick mobilization during World War II. He had taken a small, pathetic, understrength, and under-equipped Army that reflected the country's innocence and isolationism in 1941 and shaped it into the mighty force that crossed the English Channel only two and a half years later. Many ordinary Americans agreed with the president that Marshall seemed, at war's end, the greatest living American; some military people, like Matt Ridgway, thought of him as the greatest American to wear the uniform since George Washington. It was a reflection of the vast divide China had created in American politics that, only five years later, as the man who had been the final arbiter of aid to Chiang, even Marshall was vulnerable, not merely his judgments but his very patriotism questioned.

During World War II, Time had always been lavish in its praise of Marshall. The case against him then needed an explanation on the part of his enemies, of why he had turned against the Gimo. The answer, first articulated by the ever deft Wellington Koo in the Washington embassy, was simple: Marshall had become bitter and disenchanted because he had failed so dismally in his mission to that country. It was a poor answer containing no small amount of irony, for if there was ever a public servant who separated duty from ego, it was Marshall. Yet even that would not be enough. Luce's Time let him know in a March 1947 cover story that he was about to undergo a new kind of scrutiny. Had he continued to favor aid to China, there would have been no limit to the adjectives used to describe him—he would have been portrayed as the most Spartan of men, cool, decisive, knowledgeable, ready to do in a time of peace what he had done so skillfully in a time of war. Instead, Time asked a single, ominous question: "Is Marshall big enough for the gigantic task ahead of him?" It was a warning shot: get aboard, or we will take you out. More, there was a vitally important additional coda: if Luce and the China Lobby could damage the reputation or at least neutralize someone as towering as Marshall, then it was open season on everyone.

In mid-May 1947, Luce met with Wellington Koo, and much of their talk was given over to Marshall. By then Koo knew—from his own talks with Marshall a few days earlier—that the secretary of state feared that the Nationalists were already a lost cause. In effect, it was Koo who decided that they had a Marshall problem. Luce was more optimistic, because Marshall had been an ally in so many other battles. He was sure, he told Koo, that Marshall of all people understood the threat of Communism as others in the Truman administration did not. Luce was very firm: Marshall would understand what Luce called "the great inconsistency between his China policy and the present u.S. world policy." Koo said Luce told him, "Either he [Marshall] would change the China policy by bringing it into harmony with u.S. world policy or he would be discredited." "If he did not change it," Koo added, "Mr. Luce told me, Time magazine, which he controlled, would point out the inconsistencies. But Luce believed George Marshall would change the policy, that he was too intelligent not to."

When Marshall did not bend to the will of the China Lobby and the needs of the Luce empire, the line became that he himself was not a leftist or a Communist, but that he had shielded others at the State Department who were. Worse yet, he was getting his information—his lessons on China—from the wrong people. Or as Indiana's Senator William Jenner, a sub-McCarthy McCarthy, eventually put it: "General Marshall is not only willing, he is eager to play the role of a front man for traitors. The truth is this is no new role for him, for General George C. Marshall is a living lie." When someone eventually mentioned Jenner's attack to him, Marshall later said, "Jenner? Jenner? I do not believe I know the man."

If discrediting the people who were seen as discrediting Chiang was one part of Luce's attempt to keep his regime viable in American political terms, then the other part was no less shrewdly targeted. The idea again originated with Wellington Koo. The Chinese embassy people were aware not only of their own growing isolation from the Truman administration but of the administration's thin support on the issue that was central to its own vision of an enlightened foreign policy: greater collective security in Europe. Administration officials were uniformly intent on stabilizing the war-damaged European economies through the Marshall Plan, and Greece and Turkey via what became known as the Truman Doctrine, all as a bulwark against possible Soviet expansionism. It was Koo's idea to tie aid to China to all other foreign policy bills. From now on, there would be no aid to Greece and Turkey, no money for European recovery, without a Chinese aid kicker. "Are we men in Europe and mice in Asia?" Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, one of the most forceful, asked during a Senate hearing, and it was a perfect description of the new position of the Asia Firsters. For the Truman administration, increasingly besieged and lacking broad national support for its foreign aid packages, it was a kind of political blackmail.

THE SPECIFIC ISSUE being used against Truman was China, but the assault was far broader than that. Much of the anger that had been collecting came out of the Midwest, from people who were instinctively, indeed passionately, Anglophobic and who had felt during the world war that Americans had been brought in to settle someone else's mess, and that all subsequent U.S. efforts to build up an exhausted postwar Europe were nothing more than America trying to do England's work for it. These Midwestern conservatives did not see the rebuilding of Europe as part of a new self-interest in a world where, because of modern weaponry, the Atlantic Ocean had shrunk. They were, as Thomas Christensen, a Princeton professor, called them, Asialationists. It was as if each party had its own ocean. The Pacific, wrote Richard Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger in 1951, had long been the Republican ocean; the Atlantic, the Democratic one. Even Bob Taft, normally wary of any foreign entanglements, seemed to favor the Pacific. "I believe very strongly that the Far East is ultimately even more important to our future peace than is Europe." The Republicans who were challenging the administration on China had little stake in U.S. policies of recent years. The Democrats, as John Spanier, a prominent political scientist, shrewdly pointed out, had never involved any leading Republican congressional figure in their policy making on China. When Chiang's forces began to collapse, Senator Brien McMahon, a Connecticut Democrat and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, decided to check out whether there had been any Republican senatorial dissent from official policy in the crucial years from 1947 to 1949. He found not a single suggestion for a changed China policy from any member; nor had any Republican ever stood up in the House or Senate and advocated sending American combat troops there to support Chiang. They had had no answer to the questions Senator Tom Connally of Texas, one of Truman's defenders, had asked his Republican colleague Arthur Vandenberg, "Would you send your own sons to fight in the Chinese Civil War?"

That question was one Vandenberg, a critical bipartisan figure of the period, was already wrestling with as his party began to split apart in those days. He was one of the centrist Republicans who was becoming very nervous about the far right's exploitation of the China issue even as Chiang continued to collapse. It might, Vandenberg warned some of his colleagues, become a two-edged blade if the GOP came to power. Thus, in September 1948 Vandenberg, a potential secretary of state if the Republicans won, wrote to Senator Bill Knowland, one of the leading China Firsters, warning him against pushing the China issue too hard, lest the Republicans soon inherit it. "It is easy," he wrote, "to sympathize with Chiang as I always have, and still do. But it is quite another thing to plan resultful aid short of armed American aid and with American combat troops when practically all of our American-trained and American-equipped divisions surrender without firing a shot."

So the loss of China was merely the visible part of the iceberg, the issue that might help them recover control of the country, making it once again their America. Theirs was the America of the turn of the century, an America of sound business practices and old-fashioned virtues, of which they were exemplars. They did not owe money and did not depend on the government to employ them. They were the town leaders in an era when that leadership was almost exclusively white, male, and Protestant, and they were largely professional men, in an age when the middle class was still narrow. They belonged to civic clubs where almost everyone they knew felt much as they did about the drift of the country away from what they considered Americanism. The New Deal—and the forces that it had opened the door to—was the enemy. Or, as Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska had said before the 1946 election, "If the New Deal is still in control of the Congress after the election, it will owe that control to the Communist Party in this country." These men were instinctively nativist, believing it a strength, not a weakness. They neither liked nor trusted the America that had elected Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the big-city America of Catholics, Jews, Negroes, and unions. They distrusted anything or anyone that was different; and now it was time to get even. Roosevelt's America was a them and worse, a them that had run the country for almost twenty years.

Both Truman and Acheson were aware of the political game being played, and they were contemptuous of the men who were leading this gathering force. "The primitives," Acheson called them. "The animals," Truman said. Truman had known from the start that China was a loser in both domestic political and foreign policy. At a cabinet meeting in March 1947, the president had complained bitterly about their Chinese allies. As he wrote in his diary, "Chiang Kai Shek will not fight it out. [The] Communists will fight it out—they are fanatical. It [more aid] would be pouring money down a rathole under [the] present situation." The president was, in fact, furious at Chiang and his government and had been since the moment he had taken office. In his mind, he had been handed a failed policy and a treacherous, dishonest ally. There had been some quiet governmental investigations of where the aid money was going, and an immense amount of suspicious currency speculation on the part of Chiang's family had been noted. The Nationalists, Truman said, were nothing but "grafters and crooks. I'll bet you that a billion dollars of [the aid] is in New York banks today," he once told David Lilienthal, a New Dealer and public power advocate who had helped create the Tennessee Valley Authority.

What enraged Truman—and rage was the proper word—was the relentless quality of the political pressure applied by the Nationalists without any compensating military performance on their part. It went against everything he believed in—a government that would not fight, but attacked him politically and constantly demanded more weapons, which its troops did not deign to use. There was one particularly revealing meeting Truman had with Ambassador Koo on November 24, 1948, that reflected (in a phrase that would come into currency in a future war) the vast credibility gap the Nationalists now had. Truman was all too aw'are as he and Koo sat down together that he was dealing not just with the representative of a troubled foreign nation but with a major political enemy; that Koo, for all his considerable charm, was a de facto leader of a large part of the political opposition and that the embassy had been extremely close to Tom Dewey, whom Truman had just defeated.

Koo's timing could not have been worse, and his condescension toward the American president obvious. "I spoke American to him, rather than English, and we got along perfectly in our talk," Koo later noted. It was not an ideal time for the representative of a dying regime to ask for more military aid. Truman did not seem at all receptive. Did Koo know, the president asked, that he had just received information about thirty-two Chinese divisions surrendering to the Communists up around Xuzhou? And that they had turned over all of their equipment to the Communists? No, as a matter of fact, Koo did not know about it, he admitted. On the subject of aid, Truman told Koo, he knew the Chinese people had suffered a great deal and he would talk to Marshall, but that was all he would volunteer. What went unsaid was that thirty-two divisions meant that perhaps 250,000 to 300,000 men had gone over, with a comparable amount of equipment, and that this was not an isolated incident. As soon as Koo left the White House, he checked in with a friend, George Yeh, the vice minister for foreign affairs. How was the battle for Xuzhou going? he asked. Not too badly, Yeh replied. But President Truman had just told him that thirty-two divisions had surrendered there. Was that true? Well yes, admitted Yeh. Such was truth, such was reality in the days when the Nationalist armies were unraveling.

In the final months before the Communist takeover, Major General David Barr, the head of the U.S. military assistance group, actually sat in on planning sessions with Chiang's senior staff as if he were a Chinese general (among other things pleading with them to destroy their gear before they retreated so that it would not be captured by the Communists, one of many suggestions that no one ever listened to). The last American ambassador to China, John Leighton Stuart, was not allowed to meet the senior Chinese Communist leadership because that might have incited the domestic critics of u.S. policy.

Still, if Chiang lost China, he had gained, if not all of Washington, enough political support to keep him in power in Taiwan. In 1952, just after Dwight Eisenhower's election to the presidency, there was a grand dinner party given by Wellington Koo, still Chiang's ambassador, attended by a few^T of the most powerful China Firsters—Henry Luce, Senators William Knowland, Pat McCarran, and Joe McCarthy, as well as Representative Walter Judd. At one point near the end of the evening they all rose as one and toasted Chiang with their favorite battle cry, "Back to the mainland!"

In KOREA A showdown was coming. In the early days of August 1950, North Korean forces prepared for their final assault against the still undermanned UN units aligned behind the Naktong River. But the In Min Gun offensive had been slowing down noticeably. The UN command had decided that the Naktong River offered the best barrier behind which their troops might be able to catch their breath, even as new forces were arriving in country from the States. Roy Appleman, the Army historian, described the Naktong as forming a huge moat that protected roughly three-quarters of the Pusan Perimeter. The perimeter, it should be noted, was not small, and so the fighting over the next few weeks took the form of hundreds of small battles and on occasion a few larger ones. Appleman described the Pusan Perimeter as a rectangle, running roughly one hundred miles north to south, fifty miles east to west, bordered by the Sea of Japan on the east, the Korean Strait on the south, and by the Naktong itself for much of its western boundary. The river itself was slow and muddy, no more than six feet deep at its deepest point and a quarter-to a half-mile wide. ("About as wide as the Missouri," said Private First Class Charles [Butch] Hammel of the Second Engineers, who had grown up about fifty miles from the Missouri and w^Tho helped build a bridge over the Naktong, just in time for the final big North Korean push, so that they, rather than the Americans, got to use it first.) Without the natural protection the Naktong offered, American forces might not have held. For them, it was more than a barrier; it became a place where Walker could concentrate his troops, and for the first time protect his flanks.

Inside the perimeter, things were getting better. Given the state of the roads and rail lines, there was, for the first time, a chance to bring reserve units up and into action quickly and effectively. Thus, plugging the holes in his lines became somewhat easier for Walker. In addition, in mid-July, the first elements of the Second Infantry Division had shipped out from the States for Korea, and at virtually the same time some elements of the First Marine Provisional Brigade arrived as well, a force that eventually became the First Marine Division and that would spearhead the Inchon landing. All of this added up to a change in the balance of forces: the fighting ability on the part of the American units was about to improve dramatically, and time was beginning to run out on the North Koreans. By the end of August, everyone in the American command knew that a major North Korean strike was coming. The North Korean units, preparing to strike from the north and west sides of the Naktong, were still formidable, some thirteen infantry divisions, averaging about seventy-five hundred men per division, plus an armored division of about one thousand men and two armored brigades of five hundred men each. Though it was still a well-trained army, everything that had come so easily to the North Koreans only a few weeks earlier was now becoming harder. The UN Air Force flew, for instance, twice as many missions in support of the UN troops in August as in July, grinding the North Koreans down, depriving them of food and ammo and logistic support and the ability to rest. By late August, when the decisive battles along the Naktong began, the In Min Gun's best days were already behind it, though few on either side realized this. In the words of T. R. Fehrenbach, who commanded an infantry unit there, it was already "bleeding to death." As Yoo Sung Chul, a retired North Korean general, said years later, "The Korean War was planned to last only a few days so we did not plan anything in case things might go wrong. If you fight a war without planning for failures, then you are asking for trouble."

By the time Kim II Sung threw his thirteen divisions into the final battle of the Naktong on August 31, the force levels of the two sides were surprisingly equal, and elite American units were still arriving in country. For example, the last of the three regiments of the Second Infantry Division to arrive, the Thirty-eighth Regiment, reached Pusan on August 19. That meant, as some one hundred thousand North Koreans prepared for what they hoped would be the final battle and their assault on the port of Pusan, there were almost eighty thousand American troops from the Eighth Army ready to defend the Pusan Perimeter.

The ability of the Eighth Army to hold on in the previous two months represented an immense personal achievement for Johnnie Walker. Disrespected by both Tokyo and Washington, a tanker in tank-resistant terrain, a commander fighting a war with forces demonstrably weaker than those he had led in France and Germany, in those six or seven weeks from the end of July to the middle of September he was nothing less than a remarkable, fearless commander, doing almost everything right. If American military history has shortchanged any of this country's wars in the past century, it is Korea, and if any aspect of that war has been overlooked, it is the series of smaller battles fought along the Naktong in July, August, and September 1950, and if any one commander has not been given the credit he deserves, it is surely Walton Walker in those battles. "He was," his pilot Mike Lynch once said, "the forgotten commander of the forgotten war."

If the Korean War itself never captured the imagination of the American public, the fighting in the Naktong Bulge and along the Pusan Perimeter was vastly overshadowed by larger battles still to come; and yet in that terrible period it is possible that Walton Walker in Korea was a great commander. With his poorly prepared, poorly equipped, and badly undermanned forces, he was managing ever so slowly to put a brake on the advance of a talented, fierce adversary, even as the country he represented slowly began to accept its new responsibilities. When he had ordered his men to stand and die, he meant nothing less, and he included himself in that edict. If necessary, he intended to be the last American standing when the North Koreans made it to Pusan. One day in early September, he and Lynch—his constant companion—were in Taegu, quite an unimportant town to the rest of the planet before this war started, but by then for them a critical junction. If the North Koreans took Taegu, it might open the door for their army to strike at Pusan, a mere forty-five miles south. Walker had turned to Lynch and said, "You and I may finish up standing in the streets of Taegu fighting it out with these guys. My plan is that if they break through, you stay here with me. And then we'll stay here until the last minute."

Walker was tireless and fearless, flying in his tiny reconnaissance plane, sometimes just a few hundred feet above the ground, almost daring enemy machine guns to bring him down. He would lean out the window on occasion, screaming down at his troops through a bullhorn. If he thought they were retreating or panicking, he would yell at them to get back up on the line and fight, goddamn it! They flew so low that Lynch sometimes removed from the skin of the plane the requisite three stars signifying that this was the personal plane of a lieutenant general. As the history of the Korean War gradually unfolded, and as other commanders, most notably Matt Ridgway, came to the fore, Johnnie Walker faded into the background. What tended to be remembered, if anything at all, was that he had been one of the men victimized by the devastating giant Chinese ambush up along the Chongchon River in late November and early December, a folly that seriously damaged Walker's reputation, even though it had essentially taken place without his consent.

It was unfair, because in the Naktong fighting he patched units together with a deft touch, stealing a battalion from one regiment and lending it to another, using the Marines and the Twenty-seventh Wolfhounds as fire brigades to stanch potential North Korean breakthroughs. He used certain key advantages over his enemy well—greater mobility in this particular piece of real estate thanks to access to a simple but valuable rail system, and a simple but effective road system. The North Koreans were at a deficit here—they could not shift their forces quickly enough to exploit momentary breakthroughs. Much of their failure in this period reflected weak battlefield planning, failure to concentrate their forces properly, and a failure to communicate effectively as well as shift forces quickly as a given battle required. The speed of battle against an army with the technological advantages of the Americans was escalating all the time—more hardware coming into the country made the pace of battle ever faster. Their limitations, the Americans thought, were not just weaknesses in their communications equipment but basic weaknesses in an army that was too hierarchically organized. To some of the men in the Eighth Army command, Walker seemed more like a magician than a commander, so nuanced was his sense of where the North Koreans were going to hit next. A magician he was not, but he was a very good listener: the North Koreans were using extremely primitive radio codes, which they did not change frequently enough, and the Americans had broken them. Often Walker did indeed know in advance exactly where the In Min Gun was planning to strike. That was one valuable source of information. Another was his own eyes. He and Lynch flew over the In Min Gun positions so often and so low that he had a surprisingly good idea of the enemy troop dispositions and how much they changed day to day.

Still, if there was one word to describe his situation, Walker thought that it was "desperate." He was always short of men and constantly fearful of a Communist breakthrough. He began each day by turning to Colonel Eugene Landrum, his chief of staff, and saying, "Landrum, how many reserves have you dug up for me today?" That was what they needed—more men; always, the call was for more men. For the possibility that the North Koreans might punch through to the sea was a very real one. The one place where Walker had significantly underestimated the In Min Gun's capacity was in the area called the Naktong Bulge, where the river briefly bent slightly to the west before it turned east. That created a small bulge that ran about five miles on a north-south line and about four miles on an east-west one. It became in time the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the entire war. Because the Americans had pounded the North Korean Fourth Division in that area and had received quite good intelligence from prisoners about how badly beaten down the division was, they assumed North Korean assault capabilities were limited there. What they did not realize was that the enemy force in the Bulge now included not merely some elements of the Fourth but also elements of two other divisions, the Second and Ninth.

There, Walker had placed two of the three battalions of the Second Infantry Division's Twenty-third Regiment, the third being on loan to the First Cav. To say that they were stretched hopelessly thin would have been a singular understatement. Master Sergeant Harold Graham was then serving as an acting platoon leader in Charley Company of the First Battalion of the Twenty-third Regiment of the Second u.S. Infantry Division. He had already been recommended for a battlefield commission and was waiting for the commission to come through, but ended up being so severely wounded on the first night of the major Communist offensive at the Naktong Bulge that his military career would essentially be ended. Graham estimated that the division, understrength, worn down by earlier fighting, and minus a regiment, totaled around nine thousand men, instead of its normal eighteen thousand men. It had to cover a front of almost forty miles, and the First Battalion of the Twenty-third, with perhaps four to five hundred men, was holding down an area of roughly three or four miles. "I'm not sure we were ever thinner on the ground before a major attack," said Joe Stryker, a platoon leader in Charley Company who had been reassigned to the regiment as a communications officer only a few days before and so was one of the few of them to make it through those days (and who would turn himself into an expert on what happened). "It was a trip wire, I guess, but the smallest, thinnest trip wire you ever imagined," he said. Those were astonishing figures, a description not so much of a genuine defensive position but of a giant human sieve. If every soldier in the battalion had his own helicopter, it might have been doable—but realistically, it was a hopeless task. It had been that way, Stryker remembered, from the moment they had first arrived in country. When he had taken up one of his first combat positions near the front, right after their arrival, he had done what you were always supposed to do in combat—scout out the friendly units on each side of you and work out communications with them. In this case he had gotten in his jeep and driven, and driven, and driven—in all about five miles. Finally he spotted two GIs. They were from the neighboring Twenty-fourth Division and seemed thrilled to see him—they cheered him as a symbol of the entire Second Division's arrival in Korea. He barely had the heart to tell them that he was positioned five miles away.

As the men of the Twenty-third Regiment waited for the attack, the sense of isolation was even more profound than usual. Later, Colonel Paul Freeman, the commander of the regiment, reflected that though Walker's intelligence on what the North Koreans were doing generally had proved extraordinarily accurate, at this one moment in this one area, he had missed it altogether. As August was coming to an end, the men in the First Battalion of the Twenty-third Regiment were aware that something big was coming. They had spent only two days on the east bank of the Naktong when the North Koreans made their major strike. The Second Battalion had moved up behind them, first to the village of Miryang, a staging point for the defense of the Naktong, then to a village called Changnyong, even closer to the river. By the evening of the thirty-first, they were picking up so much information about increasing North Korean movements on the other side of the river that word went out all along the line to expect an attack either that night or the next one.

SOMETIMES IT IS the fate of a given unit to get in the way of something so large that it seems to have stepped into history's own path. So it was with Charley Company that night. Greatly outmanned, it faced the last great push of a huge force from the North Korean People's Army. If many of the American units placed along the long, meandering path of the Naktong were thin, then none was thinner and more endangered than the Twenty-third Regiment, and no unit of the Twenty-third was more endangered than the men of Charley Company, whose members, the handful who survived those few days, eventually came to refer to their unit as "the late Company C." Lieutenant Joe Stryker could not, even years later, believe the imbalance between the two forces that first met at the Bulge. Almost certainly, he thought, two divisions of North Koreans, perhaps as many as fifteen to twenty thousand men, poured through the general area held by Charley Company, with perhaps as many as eight to ten thousand North Koreans coming through their precise position. Normally, Stryker noted, a company, which has a strength of about two hundred men, covers a sector of twelve hundred yards. But the First Battalion, of which Charley Company was a part, had a frontage of sixteen thousand yards, which meant that each of its three companies, none of which was at full strength, had to cover about five to six thousand yards.