标题: 1969.11 当美国 "失去 "中国 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-6-19 22:37 标题: 1969.11 当美国 "失去 "中国 When America "Lost" China: The Case of John Carter Vincent
America lost its way in Asia in the 1960s in part because we pretended for twenty years that China was ours to “lose" to Communism. This is the story of a State Department China Hand who refused to play “let’s pretend” about America’s Mission in the Far East, who was purged for his realism, but whose assessments and spirit have survived the inroads of Dulles, Joe McCarthy, Time, and time.
By Ross Terrill
NOVEMBER 1969 ISSUE
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It is just twenty years since China was “lost.” In October, 1949, Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Peking, while “our" Chinese licked their wounds on Taiwan. At that time, U.S. foreign policy was in anguished transition. The great victory of 1945 bred a sense of grandeur. But the postwar years brought a deepening awareness of intractable problems and hostile powers in Europe and Asia alike.
Fear of Communist power remolded the content, style, and process of formulation of American foreign policy. Ideological anxiety became a bridge which linked domestic politics and international politics as never before. A past history of U.S. idealism toward China made Communist success there more shocking than in Eastern Europe. The postmortems on China policy, spurred by Republican resentment at tlie long Democratic dominance and by the anger of the China Lobby (supporters of Chiang Kai-shek in the United States), were bitter and zealous. Partisanship on China policy began in earnest after the congressional elections of November, 1946, which brought Republican majorities in both House and Senate. In early 1947 General George Marshall’s Mission to Chinn, which had aimed at a peaceful settlement of the civil war between Chiang and Mao, ended without success. Meanwhile, as Chiang sank deeper into military and political failure, there came in 1948 a string of Communist scares, including Klaus Fuchs’s confession of atomic espionage and Whittaker Chambers’ charges against Alger Hiss of the State Department. By 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy had pounced on China policy as a natural weapon for his crusade against the whole U.S. foreign-policy establishment. When the North Koreans moved south in June, 1950, the time of troubles for U.S. Far Eastern policy seemed complete. Since the Korean attack, which stimulated the U.S. commitment to Chiang that exists to this day, relations between Washington and Peking have made little progress. In some ways they have gotten worse, as the United States has spread some 900,000 men under arms in an arcclose to China.
True, the wistful Dulles line that the Communist regime may “pass away” has been abandoned. There have been occasional ambassadorial talks between China and the United States. Mail and literature flow between the two countries (though Washington will not permit Peking to settle the bill for Chinese materials bought by Americans) . Last July, President Nixon eased the travel restrictions on Americans visiting China, and on the importation of Chinese merchandise. Within the United States, a certain cut and thrust has returned to public discussion of China policy. Yet the basic policy remains unchanged. Washington maintains diplomatic ties with Chiang Kai-shek and his remnant, who lost the Chinese civil war, not with Mao Tse-tung and his government in Peking, -who won it. Our frozen China policy is an echo of a rankling past, of an inability to reckon with it in terms of facts rather than myths.
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One myth about the loss of China was that “blame” lay largely with the “China Hands.” Of the twenty-two Officers who belonged to the elite China Service in the State Department before World War II, and who remained with the Department in mid-1952, only two still worked on Chinese affairs. The other twenty were scattered in a variety of posts unconnected with China.
The principal China Hand attacked was John Carter Vincent. He was number two of McCarthy’s famous list of eighty-one State Department officials alleged to have Communist leanings. Born in 1900 and raised in Georgia, Vincent joined the Foreign Service at twenty-four. Beginning as ViceConsul in Changsha, he served in various China posts for a total of thirteen years, the last as Counselor of Embassy in Chungking, 1941-1949.
Promoted rapidly under several Secretaries of State, Vincent became Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs (FE) in 1945 (the equivalent position today is Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs) . In 1945 he attended, as Far Eastern specialist, the conferences at San Francisco (UN), Potsdam, and Moscow.
Vincent is a sharp, proud, elegant man, with piercing blue eyes and a straightforward manner. As a diplomat, he was an independent, even obstinate, spirit; the facts as he saw them were sovereign: ideas were not squeezed out by bureaucratic formality.
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Politically, he had been a Wilsonian Democrat, and later grafted onto his Wilsonianism a kind of social liberalism, or social democracy, as the Depression, Fascism, and the failure of the corrupt, upper-class Ivuomintang government in China thrust the economic factor to the center of any consideration of political forms. He wrote in a letter to his wife from Chungking:
I am an advocate of no particular form of government. The stale of development, education, and temperament of any social group determines what form of government is possible. But I do believe that the primary function of government is to insure, so far as possible, that the people shall live in security and freedom; as Spinoza says, that they shall “in security develop soul and body to make free use of their reason.” The Kuomintang, as the governing party of China, has failed in this task.
In 1947 Vincent was transferred from Director of FE to the remoter airs of Switzerland and then to Tangiers (1951-1953), as U.S. Minister. As the antiCommunist fever built up in Washington over the issue of China, Vincent, to his amazement, found himself under challenge. In 1952, he returned from Tangiers to face a grueling week-long interrogation by the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman was Senator Patrick McCarran. The subcommittee oscillated between trying to demonstrate that Vincent knew nothing about Communism and trying to insinuate that he was a Communist. It was assisted by assorted ex-Communists, who fiddled scholastically with Communist myths and texts. Never once, however, did it turn the discussion to American ideals and traditions, about which Vincent knew and cared somewhat more than McCarran’s ex-Communists. Vincent evaded questions out of fear of committing perjury on some detail of time or place; counsel for the subcommittee asked caustically, since Vincent had forgotten so much, had he perhaps forgotten that he had been a member of the Communist Party? It is hard to say which annoyed McCarran most: Vincent’s evasions and vagueness concerning doctrinal niceties, or his gentlemanly hearing and individualistic spirit.
He was cleared by the State Department Loyalty Board. But he then had to face a Civil Service Loyalty Review Board, whose chairman, ex-Senator Hiram Bingham, evidently aware that two of its three members saw no case against Vincent, added two new members to the review board, which arrived at the conclusion, by a majority of three to two, that there was a “reasonable doubt as to Vincent’s loyalty to the U.S.”In Tangiers, he read of this decision in the newspapers. Secretary of State Dean Acheson consulted with President Truman, and the two of them agreed not to follow’ the review board’s recommendation, hut rather to set up a further group of five, chaired by Judge Learned Hand, to review the whole matter.
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Before the new group finished its work, however, John Foster Dulles replaced Acheson as Secretary of Slate. Telling Judge Hand his services were no longer necessary, Dulles decided in March, 1953, that although there was no “reasonable doubt as to the loyalty” of Vincent, he had shown “a failure to meet the standard which is demanded of a Foreign Service Officer of his experience and responsibility at this critical time. I do not believe that he can usefully continue to serve the U.S. as a Foreign Service officer.” Vincent had talked with Dulles in February and was given the choice of retiring or being fired. He “applied for retirement,” returned from Tangiers, and settled down in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from where he view’s with a stoic eye the Far Eastern scene and the course of U.S. foreign policy which he shared in making and executing for thirty years.
A letter in his files from the then Deputy Undersecretary of State tells him he was “completely cleared by the Department of State, on all the evidence, in regard to charges as to your loyalty to the United Slates and as to your security.” But it was a Pyrrhic victory, for though he was loyal, as even Dulles did not dispute, he had committed an ultimate transgression. He had remained a mere professional diplomat, looking at the facts as he saw them, at a time of national hysteria, when it had become necessars to look at the facts as the ideology of anti-Communism construed them.
Dulles once pulled down from (he shelves in his house Stalin’s Problems of Leninism and asked Vincent it he had read it. Vincent had not. “If you had read it,” mused Dulles, “you would not have advocated the policies you did in China.” Since Stalin failed in China no less than Truman, one may wonder whether Stalin read his own book, lie that as it may, Communist dialectics was not Vincent’s forte.
Had he understood more of Communist theory (as formulated by die Chinese rather than by Stalin) , he might have understood the Nationalist (KMT)-Communist (CCP) relationship more subtly than he did. A better knowledge of the U.S.S.R., too, might have made him more wary of postwar Soviet foreign policy. But Vincent knew China intimately. Like John Davies, John Service, and many other China Officers, he had built up the substantial perception of China that George Kennan, Charles Bolden, Llewellyn Thompson, Foy Kohler, and other “Russian” Officers had built up of Russia, and that no one in the State Department possessed after the Dulles purges took place. He knew China well enough to doubt that the Russians and the Chinese woidd get on well for long; to be sure that the United States could not possibly fashion a liberal democratic China; to see in 1943 that a KMT-CCP civil war would break out after the defeat of Japan; to grasp the truth that the peasantry was the indispensable base for political power in China (lacked by the KMT).
One sees the importance of these insights by a glance at the observations of those who destroyed the China Hands. “The Chinese,” Dulles wrote, “through their religious and traditional habits of thought have become an individualistic people.” Not one China specialist in five hundred would agree with that. “There is little patriotism in China,” he observed in 1950. Failure to understand patriotism and nationalism has perhaps been no less disastrous for U.S. China policy than failure to understand Problems of Leninism. Vincent’s papers and the public record of what he said reveal little sentimentality about China. His memoranda (whatever errors they may contain) are models of “national interest” thinking about Far Eastern affairs. He enjoyed the company of Chinese, but the naturalness of his relations with them excluded zealous Sinophilism. He wrote from Chungking in May, 1942:
Had dinner with Madame Sun Yat-sen. Dick Smith was the other foreigner present; the rest, about ten, were Chinese. Madame C[hiang] and Madame k[uug] were there. Also father H. H. K[ung], Good Chinese food. I was literally encompassed by Soong sisters. Sitting opposite Madame Sun,1 in Chinese fashion, between Madame C and Madame K. We played bad bridge afterwards until very late. . . . Dick is foolish but the Chinese like him. I am not so foolish but they seem to like me.
The common denominator is, I suppose, that we both like the Chinese and they recognise it. More than tiiat: there is no conscious or subconscious feeling ol superiority and they recognise it. There is no question of “using” each other’s company. We are simply enjoying each other’s company.
That is hardly normal in China. Even the missionaries “love” with a purpose.
He was neither arrogant nor effusive toward the Chinese. Another letter from Chungking reads: “I try to do my job and these Soong sisters are part of it; and a pleasant part. But my bones have not been reduced to jelly nor my sight beclouded. The Ambassador will admit that and he admits little, and so will the sisters, I think.” Nor did Vincent build up exaggerated Sinophilic myths when he returned to the United States. He remembers without enthusiasm the gatherings of Old China Hands: “the sentimental cocktail parties at the Plaza in New York, where people wrapped themselves around each other who had hardly been acquaintances in Shanghai.”
Vincent strove to look at China from the point of view of overall U.S. interests in the Far East. While be was its director, FE had some disagreement with the European Division over the attitude to adopt toward the nationalist movements then seeking an end to British, Dutch, and French colonial rule in Asia. FE was generally sympathetic toward struggles such as that of Sukarno and Sjahrir against the Dutch; the European Division (which enjoyed higher prestige in the Department than FE) was opposed. Vincent’s argument was that it was foolish for the U.S. to get on the wrong side of the emerging Asian nationalist regimes. It was, characteristically, a “national interest” argument. He remembers George Kennan remarking: “John Charter, your views on Asian policy are quite sound from the traditional LTS. standpoint, but the immediate problem is to maintain the morale of Europe and its will to resist the Communist challenge.”
On one vital policy issue Vincent was prophetic. He urged the United States to oppose Japanese militarism in the mid1930s, arguing that the sooner if was opposed the less terrible would be the consequences. When Japan attacked China in 1937, Tokyo probably considered Russia the only serious threat to Japanese plans. The United Slates, despite rich talk about China’s integrity and nonaggression, had its arms firmly folded. Its interest was focused upon Europe, and it was unprepared, as the Chinese recall today, even to put an end to the supplies of U.S. fuel with which Japanese planes were devastating China. The Open Door was a splendid principle, but it did not seem to he much more.
Vincent had been U.S. Consul in Mukden when the Japanese went into Manchuria in 1931. “When Consul at Dairen in 1934, he attended a dinner given by the Japanese military, and noticed on the wall a map which showed Japanese authority extending from Manchuria all the way down to the Yellow River. From the time he came to FE in 1935, after ten years in Changsha, Hankow, Peking, Tsinan, Mukden, Dairen, and Nanking, he increasingly favored strong support for Chiang against the Japanese threat. “From the long viewpoint,” he argued in a memorandum of July, 1938, “our involvement in the Far Fast may not be avoided unless Japanese militarism is defeated.” He did not believe, nor did he think the Japanese themselves believed, that “Japanese aggression, if successful in China, [would] stop there.” He saw Japanese militarism as an “aggressive force which should not be expected to become satiated on successful aggression or deterred from aggression by normal economic and political considerations.” He judged that “American rights and interests may not be preserved unless China’s sovereignty is preserved.” He urged withholding of loans, material credits, and trade that assisted Japan; a clear statement that the doctrine of nonrecognition applied to any regime Japan set up; financial aid to Chiang; and collective action with other interested governments to deter Japan. All of these measures were eventually taken. Few would deny they were taken far too late.
October 15th. 1942
Mes enfants!
This is a photograph-game-present, and this is how you play the game, Give your friends three guesses to guess which one is your father (first be sure to ask your mother which one is your father). If they can guess right in three guesses then give them a piece of candy; if they cannot guess make them give yon a piece of candy. If anybody guesses that I am the old man with the long beard, make him pay two pieces of candy.
The picture was taken on October 3rd when we went to present Mr. Wendell Willkie, the man who ran for President of the United States in 1940 and still thinks he is running even though Mr. Roosevelt outran him and is already there. . . . After the presentation we had a lunch of fifteen courses and four wines and alter that we had the picture taken. The luncheon lasted for over two hours. . . . We had birds’ nest soup. We had little suckling pig. We had sharks’ fins. We had pigeons eggs. We had fish with sweet-sour sauce (this for your mother). We had pigs feet. We had deers tendons. Well that’s enough to remember. We also had champagne. .So by the time we had this picture taken we were pretty full. We don’t usnally eat so well in Chungking hut this was a very special occasion on account of Mr. Willkie.
These are the people in the photograph going from left to right:
First step: Admiral Cien Shao-kwan in the white navv uniform. He doesn’t have much of a navy in China but he is a nice man and is useful because he is a connais seur [sic] of good food—a gourmet—and likes to invite people for dinner, Yu Yujen, the old man with the long heard, He is President of the Control Yuan, a department of the government that controls officials. Dr. H. H. Kung, Vice President of the Executive Yuan and Minister of Finance. The Executive Yuan runs the Government. Mr. Wendell Willkie who needs no introduction probably even to you two. He would be disappointed if he did. He loves children. He kissed several while he was here. Dr. Lin Sen (his last name is Lin and his first name is Sen: the Chinese put their hist name first which is all right. No reason why you should not he called Vincent John Carter or Vincent Elizabeth .Sheila) : Dr. Lin as I told you is Chairman of the Chinese Government and doesn’t have much to do. He is a nice old man, though, and shouldn’t be made to work very hard. Ambassador Gauss who, as you may have heard, is head of the Embassy in which I work. He feels pretty badlv but not as badlv as he looks. Mr. Chit Chen, President of the Judicial Yuan which looks after laws which isn’t a vers hard job because nobody cares much about laws anyway. General Ho Yitigchin, Chief of Staff of the Chinese Armies and Minister of Military Administration. He is a pretty clever man although he doesn’t look like it in this picture. He doesn’t fight much anymore but he looks after a lot of things. , . .
I want to come home soon because I love yon—and your Mother.
PA.
Now Mr. Dulles was hardly in the vanguard of those urging support for Chiang against Japan. True, he thought it a glorious thing, in retrospect, that Chiang had resisted Japan, that Chiang decided to “base his policy on the historic friendship of the U.S. toward China.” True, he became a great champion of Chiang. True, he accused Vincent of insufficient support for Chiang. But in the 1930s, when the Generalissimo was in need and alone, Dulles had not yet begun to talk of “massive retaliation.” In 1938 he went to China and urged Chiang to compromise with the Japanese.
In 1939 Dulles wrote War, Peace and Change, in which there is a truly astonishing absence of any advocacy of “massive retaliation” against either Germany or Japan. The major theme of its empirical sections is a call to appreciate the “interplay of cause and effect” behind German, Italian, and Japanese aggression. “There is room for much difference of opinion and of choice of emphasis.” His emphasis fell this way: “The Japanese are a people of great energy. They possess to a marked degree those qualities which we have referred to as requiring an adequate national domain. Their own territory is meager in quantity, and quality. Some enlargement of their national domain seemed called for.” Mr. Dulles was a great man for peace in 1939.
It is clear that Vincent was not absolutely opposed to American intervention in Asia. It was a question of whether U.S. interests were importantly at stake; whether the intervention could be effective; and whether the Asian elements the United States would intervene to support were stable, progressive, and actively helping themselves. He thought the case for intervention against Japan in the late 1930s strong. He thought the case for direct U.S. intervention in the Chinese civil war a decade later weak. His criteria were the same. U.S. interests were not importantly at stake in the Kuomintang-Communist struggle; U.S. intervention could not be effective; and Chiang, by the late 1940s, was no longer strong, progressive, or an effective fighter for his own cause. In recent years, these same criteria have been among the factors leading him to oppose the Vietnam War.
George Kennan has observed:
It was not . . . communist efforts which destroyed the old order in Europe itself in the thirties and forties and eventually delivered the eastern half of the continent into communist hands; it was Hitler who did this. And, similarly, in East Asia, it was not Moscow, and least of all Washington, which really delivered China into the hands of the communists; it was the Japanese.
If Kennan is right, we confront a strange irony. Vincent was removed by Dulles for having helped lose China to the Communists. Yet it was Vincent, and not Dulles, who wanted the United States to try and stop Japan’s thrust into China, at a time when stopping Japan might have saved Chiang from his rapid decline, and prevented Mao from drawing the enormous political capital he did from the anti-Japanese struggle.
Vincent thought strategically about the Far East. He saw the weakness of China as a fundamental evil for the Asian situation. “The situation in China during the two decades prior to the last war,” he said in a lecture series named for Madame Chiang Kai-shek at Wellesley College in 1946, “gave a strong encouragement to, if it did not actually make possible, Japan’s war upon us in 1941.” Dulles on the other hand thought ideologically about the Far East. Before the war his theme might be summarized as “moral fiber.” After the war it was “opposition to Communism.” In neither period did his mind seem to work along strategic lines, as his views on Japan in 1939 and China in 1950 make all too plain.
Vincent was no more “anti-Japan,” in any moralistic or absolute sense, than he was pro-China. That is clear from the views he gave on postwar Japan, in off-the-record remarks at a Foreign Policy Association luncheon in December, 1944.
I am not a Japanese expert. I simply know them at their worst from four years in Manchuria. There is much serious thought being given to treatment of Japan after its defeat. There is the “stew in their own juice” school of thought; there is the “stability under the Emperor or anybody and get out quickly” school; there is the school that foresees a long and difficult period of military administration; and there is the school that believes the Japanese people would support a liberal democratic government if given a chance. I belong to none of these schools but I have a leaning toward the latter. . . . My point is that the rank and file of the Japanese seem capable of making an intelligent choice through the ballot if given the opportunity.
It is a judgment that does not look too bad twentyfive years later.
What could the United States have done in China in the 1940s that was not done? Much criticism of the China Hands centered on the Marshall Mission to China of 19451947. Senator Joseph McCarthy, in his defense of an “uncontaminatedly American foreign policy,” claimed that the policy embodied in the Marshall Mission “turned 450,000,000 friends of America into 450,000,000 foes.” Dulles said to Vincent, after the event: “I just don’t see how you and Acheson and Truman could possibly have been so shortsighted as to send Marshall to China.”
The argument against the Mission was that it was unreasonable, even suicidal, to urge that Chiang cooperate with the Communists, given his own weakness, and given the abyss of convictions that separated them. The alternative suggested was massive American intervention on the side of Chiang, without any attempt to bring about some kind of cooperation or coalition between the contending parties. But was massive U.S. intervention politically and militarily feasible?
Republicans offered no clear alternative policy at the time. The basic reason was that people were sick of war. And influential opinion thought European affairs more important than Far Eastern affairs (hence the emergency in Greece and Turkey was allowed to kill Vincent’s plan to spend half a billion dollars in Korea). As Truman points out in his memoirs, the public as a whole was in no mood at all to have hundreds of thousands of Americans go and fight in China.
Accusers of the China Hands claimed that “proCommunists” in the State Department drew up a directive to Marshall which put impossible demands upon Chiang. Yet a detailed study by Herbert Feis, in The China Tangle, uncovered no dissension within the various arms of the government over the directive. Vincent prepared an early draft. The Pentagon prepared its own draft. I he final version of the directive show’s little change from the basic lines of Vincent’s draft. Vincent had placed slightly more emphasis upon the attainment of a further degree of unity in China as a precondition of U.S. economic aid. But the differences were small, and they were resolved to the satisfaction of all parties.
The conclusion of Dean Acheson in his “Letter of Transmittal” of the China White Paper has not been overturned by twenty years of further digestion of the evidence: Chiang could have been saved from defeat only by American intervention beyond the “reasonable limits of its capabilities.” Whether Chiang could ever have won, in the full political sense, was highly doubtful even then. He was not short of arms {in the sense that he could have effectively used more), as he and the China Lobby claimed: and much of what he was given was captured by the Communists.
When a spokesman for the CIA was sent to brief a private discussion on China at the State Department in October, 1949, he reported: “The Communist forces that took over Tientsin were so completely equipped with American equipment that they appeared to be American equipped units.” The Vietnam experience of the United States raises a further doubt. If U.S. intervention to aid Saigon against the NLF and Hanoi has brought such loss, escalation, frustration, so many incalculable twists and turns, could an effective intervention in China, thirty times as Dig as Vietnam, with twenty-five times the population, have been made without precipitating a third world war?
In a devilish moment, Vincent observed years later: “What a pity Dewey was not elected in 1944, so that Dulles could have had a chance to ‘save China.’ ” Actually, there was a weakness in Vincent’s own position as an architect of the Marshall Mission which has seldom been focused upon (perhaps only by Walter Li ppm an n, reviewing the China White Paper in 1949). If it was true that nothing the United States could have done would have determined the outcome of the Chinese civil war, why did Vincent continue for so long to back Chiang, whom he had known could not win against the Communists?
The American ideal of self-determination, and with it the American awareness ol the potency of nationalism, all but disappeared after the “Loss of China.” Vincent recalls that when lie headed FE, one of his toughest tasks was to allay congressional, press, and public fear that U.S. ground troops might be sent to China. “People forget, he says today, “that there was a time when you simply did not go into an Asian country and take over.
In 1952, the House Un-American Activities Committee interrogated former Ambassador to China Clarence Gauss and Vincent. HUAC’s concern was that a leftish paper called The Voice of China had been published in Shanghai by an American, at a time when Gauss was U.S. Consul-General in that city and Vincent was working on China affairs in Washington. Gauss and Vincent tried to suggest that the reason why they did not suppress The Loice of China was that the wretched paper was being published not in the United States but in China, and that the State Department had no power to suppress it. HUAC was utterly unimpressed by such a petty jurisdictional quibble. Representative Harold Velde pinpointed its concern:
. . . if American authorities operating in foreign countries, apparently diplomats, do not have any legal way of stopping the circulation of subversive material, I think it is high time that the Congress made available some way to our American diplomats operating in foreign countries to do just that.
We can see in the story of Vincent how interests and desires came to be confused in U.S. China policy. It is easier to indulge in dreams when you have few responsibilities. That was true of America’s first perceptions of China. For almost a century from the Opium Wars, it was Britain that did the necessary military dirty work, and established, with whatever fragments of cooperation they could induce from the Chinese, the institutions indispensable to trade and religion on the China coast. America was free to be idealistic about China. The legacy of idealism continued into the period of heavy U.S. responsibility in China, which reached its climax in the 1940s. It continues now, even more confusedly, into a period when the United States has no possibility of exercising moral influence upon China, but has a profound interest in coming to certain businesslike understandings with China. The problem is that U.S. policy is still built too much on desires for China, and too little on U.S. interests in relation to China.
In the first years of the cold war there seemed to be a historical creedal struggle unfolding, comparable with that which brought on the religious wars of the sixteenth century. This made it easy for the ideologues to portray the Chinese civil war as one act in a global creedal drama. Instead of analyzing U.S. interests, they bewailed the shattering ol a U.S. dream. It proved easier to blur the issues than to admit that a Communist regime had come to power after its opponents had failed to govern China with strength and justice. It proved more satisfying to say that the United States could have stopped Mao, if the China Hands had not betrayed their country—and thus sustain the image of an omnicompetent and innocent America—than to admit that the world was a very complicated place, diverse in culture, polycentric in power, in which prudence and tolerance might be worth as much as zeal.
The Vincents had met Henry Luce of Time and Life at dinner parties in Georgetown. After China went Communist, Luce’s magazines attacked Vincent and others responsible for the State Department’s “pro-Communist" line. From Tangiers, where Vincent was U.S. Minister, Mrs. Vincent wrote to Luce in February, 1953, remonstrating against Time’s coverage. Luce wrote to Mrs. Vincent an analysis of the China tragedy as he saw it:
The China business has been in every sense a tragedy—especially lor the millions and millions of Chinese who have been killed, brutalised and brainwashed. As to America’s relation to this problem, opinions and judgments differ. That America had an important relation cannot be disputed: the most eminent presence of the most eminent George Marshall attested to our involvement. Marshall failed. He. of course, will say it wasn’t his fault— it was Chiang Kai-shek’s or somebody else’s or “fate.” In any case Marshall, and the strategy he pursued failed. I was astounded that Marshall, when he got to China, pursued the strategy he did.
I believed it was a hopeless strategy based on a hideous error in evaluation of all the factors.
Luce evidently had a deep humanitarian concern for China. But neither in his long letter nor in Time does he say upon what conception of U.S. interests in the Far East his attack on the “hideous error in evaluation of all the factors” is based. He had clear desires for China, but there is no clue as to what he thought U.S. interests toward China were. In her letter to Luce, Mrs. Vincent criticized the “pro-Chiang or pro-Mao” approach of Time. “That to me is a contrived issue,” she wrote. “The real one is what was pro-American and what was anti-American.” From the point of view of American interests, it was vital to He clear under what conditions the United States could intervene effectively. To have desires or political preferences which could not be furthered by effective intervention was pipe-dreaming.
It is curious how policyless was the policy of Dulles himself toward China. His book War or Pence, which begins with a chapter on “The Danger" and ends with one entitled “Our Spiritual Need,”is more like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress than a book on foreign policy. The idea of an “evertightening noose” runs through its pages. Biblical texts are jerked directly into a political application. Thus St. Paul is pitted against Mao and Stalin: “Under the pressure of faith and hope and peaceful works, tlie rigid, top-heavy and overextended structure of Communist rule could readily come into a state of collapse.” Policy and missionary activity seem to be one and the same thing. But is “policy” die right word? Is it a policy to hope that fate or God or Chiang Kai-shek will bring down tlie government in Peking?
Dulles applied Christian morality directly to the world of nations. He thought governments should carry out biblical injunctions. And he analyzed U.S. foreign policy toward the U.S.S.R. from the starting point that Soviet Communism was godless. Vincent, however, appraised Communists on the basis of what they did rather than what they were supposed to believe. And he saw morality entering foreign policy indirectly, mediated through the choices made by a democratic people. The epitaph for his efforts to shape U.S. China policy could well have been Lord Palmerston’s remark about British foreign policy: “We have no eternal enemies, only eternal interests.”
John Canter Vincent’s main fault lay in being an unideological man in a period which called for ideological swagger. After World War II, there came a period of panic. America had rather suddenly emerged from comparative isolationism to world leadership. The transition was accompanied by intense ideological self-consciousness. Perhaps ideological chauvinism helped conceal self-doubts in the face of enormous responsibilities.
Be that as it may, there seemed to be a momentary loss of confidence in the real traditions of America. “The only ones we can believe are those who were in the know,” observed Senator Homer Ferguson at the McCarran Subcommittee Hearings, “the ex-party boys.” It was no longer enough to be an ordinary American. Best ol all was to be an ex-Communist. In her 1953 letter to Henry Luce, Mrs. Vincent observed: “To the McCarran Committee, honor lies only with ex-communists.” And she added these poignant, bewildered words: “I find at this moment in our career our greatest difficulty is that we are not ex-anything, still Christians, still diplomats, still loyal Americans.”
A further issue reflected into the present by the mirror of the past is that of loyalty in the Foreign Service. Vincent paid a price for being an unideological man in an ideological period; in this way the State Department lost its best China men. But it also lost morale. When William Rogers became Secretary of State in 1969, he greeted the Foreign Service with a message that had a deep impact. “I hope to lead a receptive and open establishment, where men speak their minds and are listened to on merit, and where divergent views are fully and promptly passed on for decision.” It was contrasted in the Department with the comparable message of Dulles on his first day as Secretary of State, when he called for “positive loyalty.”
Vincent observed years later: “Any young Foreign Service Officer who read through the McCarran Hearings may not be edified but he would certainly be troubled.” Young men considering the Foreign Service as a career would also be deterred. (In 1949, 1128 candidates took the Foreign Service examinations: in 1950 only 807 did; and in 1951 only 760.) Good reporting from the field depends heavily upon there being in Washington what Rogers called a “receptive and open establishment”; an establishment which docs not equate “error” with “disloyalty.” It depends also upon the richness of the contacts the Officer is able to cultivate at his post. Vincent’s bitter experience of the consequences of being an acquaintance of Madame Sun was small encouragement to the cultivation of contacts.
Within the Department of State, distrust grew as Senator Joseph McCarthy and his helpers sought out damaging information, sometimes setting Officer against Officer in the process. While in Switzerland, Vincent discovered that McCarthy had dispatched an agent named Charles Davis there to try and get “evidence” against him. He received a telegram, sent from within Switzerland, above a signature he did not recognize, asking him to meet at such and such a place “concerning a matter of interest to us both.” Presumably the plan was to produce a copy of this telegram at a later date, as proof of the subversive contacts Vincent maintained in Switzerland, for the signature on the telegram was that of a Swiss Communist official. Davis had sent the telegram, signing it with the name of the Swiss Communist. The diligent Swiss police quickly discovered this, and Davis was imprisoned. From prison he wrote to Vincent admitting his treachery and apologizing.
Dulles meant by “positive loyalty” a kind of “right-thinking,” Vincent considered that loyalty in the Foreign Service should mean loyalty in carrying out government policy. That may not mean one agrees with all of it, or that reports from the field may not, at any point of time, present views that cast doubt on it. The other view is that loyalty is not just a matter of conduct. In addition to carrying out its policy, you must think tire way the government seems to think, and certainly not reveal any contrary thoughts—or facts which call the government view in question—in a field report. Mr. Rogers appears to have proclaimed the obsolescence of positive loyalty.
The issues over which Vincent was attacked have remained pivotal: the distinction between national interests and ideological desires; the importance of self-determination in Asia; realistic assessment of what the United States can and cannot achieve, especially by force, in Asia; a Foreign Service in which officers are encouraged to report what they see and believe.
Sitting in his Cambridge garden in the summer of 1969, his grandson on one side and a cat on the other, Vincent offered his reflections on the way U.S. Far Eastern policy has evolved since the McCarthy hysteria and the Dulles secretaryship.
In sixteen years of retirement, he has remained a close observer of the scene, sharing Ins views and experience in a seminar at Radcliffe, and at Harvard’s East Asian Research Center, where he has been an Associate (the Center will publish his Extraterritorial System in China in December).
In some ways he sees Dean Rusk as more of an ideologue than Dulles. “Dulles was a smart baby, and unscrupulous. Rusk was neither, but he was even more inflexible about bis mistaken convictions than Dulles.” Vincent sees Rogers and Elliot Richardson, whom Rogers chose as Undersecretary of State, as pragmatists who may be able to reduce tensions in the Far East.
Vincent favors an important role for the United States in Asia: “T his country couldn’t be isolationist if it tried.” Vietnam he considered a mistake, for reasons which go to the heart of his experience as a China Hand. One is that it “smacks too much of colonialism to prop up a government against a widely supported uprising from within the country itself.” He sees Dulles’ support for the French in Indochina in 1954 as a crucial step toward what Johnson did in Vietnam. And the 1954 policy was erected on the ashes of his own unsuccessful attempt, in the immediate postwar years, to keep U.S. policy moderately anticolonialist. Another reason is that anti-Communism as an ideology was elevated to the center of U.S. policy, which made it impossible to appraise Vietnamese politics in sophisticated terms. Vincent thinks that Truman (whose signed photo sits in the Vincent home, with a notation visible on the presidential deskpacl: “See Joint Carter Vincent about China”) was anti-Communist above all out of narrowness. Like other China Hands, Vincent had seemingly become immune to an anti-Communism based on narrowness—on mere suspicion of the unfamiliar —by many years of living amidst other cultures. He sees some hope in the wide experience of the world which Nixon now has behind him. He likes the President’s recent statement “Political philosophies cannot permanently divide the peoples of the world”; “admission of error,” he muses, “is the beginning of wisdom.”
A third issue which concerns Vincent is “respect for Asians.” Like General Joseph Stilwell, Vincent treated Chinese just as he treated Westerners. The soberest of men, Vincent tends to become mildly excited on this topic. “Asians are perfectly capable of handling their own affairs. The trouble with Dulles, and with Luce, too, was that they never doubted they knew what was best for Asians. They were patronizing.”
Of course there is a vast difference of scale between the China and Vietnam issues. China policy could seldom be effectively backed up with action. I he tragedy of Vietnam policy was that massive intervention—which re as an option, and was tried—loundered upon a faulty analysis of the East Asian scene. This is where the lessons learned from the China case could have affected Vietnam policy. But the China Hands were not in Washington to speak their minds.
On China policy, Vincent finds little to praise; it is really a case of ‘no policy,’ just prejudices on both sides.” The July measures of Mr. Nixon were welcome, but hardly more than a gesture. “They are good because they will put some pressure on the Chinese, who can’t refuse visas to Americans forever.” He thinks Peking has had plenty of reason over the years to be hostile to the United States. “Just think ol Dulles saying we could bomb Hankow out of existence; and Radford too, and Vice President Nixon, who had a hand in those attitudes. The Democratic Administrations missed opportunities. Perhaps if Kennedy had had a big majority, he would have stood up to conservative pressures on China. Johnson had the majority but no wisdom.”
Vincent’s social philosophy was very liberal. It was not a social philosophy (like that of the next generation of liberals) that was oriented around an attitude toward Communism. Communism did not come into the picture of his social philosophy; he thought the hill of social injustice could be breasted by another path entirely, which, broadly speaking, could be called social democratic. He was a non-Communist rather than an anti-Communist.
When that is said, it remains true that it was Vincent the forthright diplomat, rather than Vincent the social liberal, that the McCarthyites were infuriated by and fired tHeir poisoned darts at. He was really a very orthodox diplomat, an embodiment, indeed, of the traditions of American diplomacy. That was his trouble. The fatal charge against John Carter Vincent was that he did not, and could not, become an ideologue to fit a sudden fashion of crusading anti-Communism.
But (he fatal charge of 1952 looks today more like a badge of honor in 1969. The heartening thing about Vincent today, amidst the trauma of Vietnam, is that he reminds a younger generation of some admirable features of American diplomacy, when at its best and when allowed to be itself. When young people have come up the leafy path of his Cambridge home to ask his advice about entering the Foreign Service, he has never urged them not to enter, but encouraged them to go in and do their best and make the Service as good as it should be.
ACHESON ON VINCENT
Mr. Dean Acheson, in a book of memoirs just published by Norton, Present at the Creation ($12.50), recalls the Vincent case.
Of the finding of the President’s Loyalty Review Board, which reversed the State Department’s own judgment and found Vincent’s loyalty suspect:
I knew John Carter and the charges against him well enough to know the imputation of disloyalty was unfounded and that the charges were in reality based upon the policies that he had recommended and the valuations of situations he had made and that largely I had accepted. I also had high regard for the Department's board and its chairman and none for the President’s board and its chairman. Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut. . . . I cotdd disregard its advice and restore Vincent to active duty. This, however, would do him little good since Senator McCarthy would delight in renewing charges against him and demand that my successor act upon the presidential Review Board’s decision. After consulting with the President, we decided that the better course would be to appoint a group of unimpeachable authority and reputation to review the record and the two conflicting recommendations. . . . I had no doubt what a fair and judicial decision would be.
On Dulles’ final condemnation of Vincent:
Mr. Dulles’ six predecessors, under all of whom Mr. Vincent had served in the China field, did not find his judgment or services defective or substandard. On the contrary, they relied upon him and promoted him. Mr. Dulles’ administration was later to find the morale of the State Department personnel in need of improvement.
Of Acheson’s farewell at the State Department in 1955.
Few experiences have so moved me. They had been through three years of bitter persecution and vilification, largely at the hands of fools and self-seeking blackguards, touted by the press. The worst, I feared, was still ahead of them, 'when what protection the President and I had been able to interpose against abuse would be withdrawn.
Ross Terrill, an Australian, currently Frank Knox Fellow in Political Science at Harvard, has talked extensively with John Carter Vincent in his preparation of this study. Since visiting Peking five years ago, Mr. Terrill has written on China and Communist politics in the Political Science Quarterly, China Quarterly, and other scholarly journals.
One day toward the end of the war, when Vincent was hack in Washington from Chungking, he chanced to meet a friend in the street who was about to go to China. He “sent his regards,”— orally, through this friend to Madame Sun Vat-sen. Madame Sun was later to be a high, if largely honorary, official in Peking. However, she was at this time still in the circle of her sisters in Chungking. One of those sisters was none other than Madame Chiang Kai-shek; the other was the wife of H. H. Rung, one of Chiang’s highest aides. The McCarran Subcommittee found it worthwhile to spend thirty minutes trying to draw out the sinister inner meaning of this trifling social amenity. The Subcommittee might have boggled had they known that when Vincent left Chungking in May, 1943, Madame Sun gave him an antique bamboo brush holder, inscribed with a charming poem in Chinese characters. ↩
多年后，文森特在一个魔鬼般的时刻指出 "杜威没有在1944年当选真是太可惜了，这样杜勒斯就有机会'拯救中国'了。"实际上，作为马歇尔使命的设计者，文森特自己的立场有一个弱点，而这个弱点很少被关注（也许只有Walter Li ppm一个人在1949年回顾中国白皮书的时候才关注）。如果美国所做的一切真的不能决定中国内战的结果，那么文森特为什么还要长期支持他明知无法战胜共产党的蒋介石？