XII. Cairo

Now we even read it between the lines written by his adula tors. He began to fumble his role. Old friends like Hull and Byrnes and Stimson and Jones saw this happening. A train of incredible blunders of policy and decisionfollowed. And because he was now acting his part on a global stage, where every miscue could have burgeoning historic consequences, his repeated bun gles at Cairo, Teheran, Quebec, and finally at Yalta, began to take on the gravity of a world catastrophe.

CAIRO 197 This is not to say there was any specific moment when the President lost his grip. And those, like Byrnes, who charitably blame his sagging health for the hatcheries of the final months miss the point of the Roosevelt tragedy. The Roosevelt who wilted before the Russian dictator at Yalta was the same Roose velt who had sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow with a blank check in 1941,who had feigned astonishment when the Japanese were provoked into "firing the first shot" in the Pacific, and who for three years had blocked Churchill's strategy in Europe every time it endangered Stalin's ambitions. The defects of personality which ambushed him when he sat down with Stalin-such as the narcissism which permitted him to gamble so heavily on his personal charm-were all there during the earlier years. It was the vertigo of unbridled world power that brought out the basic weakness of the Roosevelt character. The picture was gradually coming into focus.

His self-conceit now took on a new dimension. For begin ning with the Cairo meeting with Churchill and Chiang Kai shek, Roosevelt began to fall victim to· the messianic complex which had destroyed Wilson in 1919.He began to envisage him self as the Master Builder of the shiny new postwar world. It was a role he was pathetically unsuited to attempt. The Western powers could now reach any target in Germany with a thousand bombers by day or night. In a series of disasters, the Wehrmacht had been driven back from the Volga to the Dnieper. The OVERLORD Channel invasion was being pre pared upon a stage so enormous that its certain success was as sured. Roosevelt could now speak to his war allies as the leader of a coalition which was sure of victory. He could seriously con sider the map of the world which was to follow. In this pre-victory hour, one of the Big Four-China-was becoming weaker, not stronger. She needed a shot in the arm.

That was supposedly one of the purposes of the Cairo Confer198 WASTEBASKET ROAD ence, to which Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek were invited. China had been bled white by six years of continu ous war with Japan. In its gloomy Chungking fastness, the Kuomintang government's will to fight was still strong, but its means had dwindled alarmingly. Had Japan been her only enemy, China could have carried on and exacted a heavy toll. Unfortunately, China faced a second enemy more terrible than the first. This enemy was internal Communist rebellion. While she fought desperately on her two.. thousand-mile front to expel the Japanese invaders, she was ex periencing the grim sensation of seeing tens of thousands of square miles of her domain seized or infiltrated by Communist activists who were taking their orders from Moscow. What had happened was that the confusion of war had given the declining Chinese Communist Party a chance to make a sensational come..

back in North China, and because he was preoccupied with the Japanese aggressors, President Chiang Kai-shek was powerless to take countersteps to check the power-hungry native Reds. The 1943 situation stemmed back to 1937, when Chiang, just liberated from the ordeal of kidnapping by warlords at Sian, made the mistake of his life by tnaking peace with the Chinese Communists. At that time, the Communists, who had been fighting Chiang continuously since 1927, were just about ready to quit. Confined to a small enclave around Yenan in the north west province of Shensi, their plight was so desperate that their leaders had, even before the Sian affair, made overtures to repre sentatives of Chiang, looking toward dissolution.1 Their top bosseswere making plans to go to Europe. When the Japanese attack was imminent in 1937, Chiang de termined that China must be unified, even at the cost of toler..

ating the Communists. If they could be induced to employ their Red Army to repel the Japanese, he would take them back into the fold. We now know that this failure to mop up the Chinese CAIRO 199 Communists whenhe could have done so was the supreme blun der which brought Chiang down to ruin in 1948.But at the time, with Japan threatening total war, the decision seemed justified. In an agreement which he concluded with the Communists in February, 1937, Chiang promised to discontinue his Commu nist-suppression policy. They, in turn, agreed to place their insur rectionary army under the authority of the National Army, to be known as the Eighteenth Group Army. The Communist forces were limited by this agreement to a strength of forty-five thou sand men, later increased to sixty thousand. They were to wage guerrilla war against the Japanese in specified areas in North and Northwest China.2 The Communists concluded this agree ment with their tongues in their cheeks.

However, after Chiang was driven to Chungking, with no re maining armed force of any size north of the Yellow River, the Communists realized that their chance had come. Instead of fighting the Japanese, they withdrew from the war almost com pletely after Russia signed the Molotov-Matsuoka Treaty with Japan in April, 1941. With Chiang unable to halt them, they proceeded to carve out an empire for themselves in the unpoliced rural areas between the Japanese-occupied cities. Spreading out, fanlike, through the countryside between the scattered Japanese bases, the Communists soon dominated most of the provinces of Hopeh, Chahar, Suiyuan, Shensi, Kansu, Anhwei, Shantung, and even northern Kiangsu-a vast empire of ninety million inhabitants. Disregarding the 1937 agreement with Chiang limiting the Red Army to four divisions, they increased their armed strength to more than five hundred thou sand men, backed by partially armed local militia detachments.

3 In thus defying the Chungking government, the Communists had their eyes firmly set on the· date of Japanese defeat. They knew that when Japanese authority disintegrated after the sur render, control of the populous northern provinces-the heart of 200 WASTEBASKET ROAD China-would pass, during the interregnum of confusion, to whomever was on the ground with the largest forces.Chiang and his main forces were fifteen hundred or two thousand miles away in Szechwan and Burma and would be powerless to act in the north. By their cynical use of the war period to infiltrate and to arm, the Communists were making certain that they would be the real victors of the war. In their optimistic dreams, they envisaged Communist occupation of Nanking, Shanghai, and even Manchuria when the Japanese fell. This was the harrowing situation which confronted Chiang Kai-shek in 1943 as he clung unhappily to his bomb-scarred Chungking capital. It was a situation which cried for bold, imag inative American intervention. It is one of the major disasters of the war that the United States, under Roosevelt, instead of bringing boldness and imagination to the Far East, brought ir resoluteness and abjection.

Chiang was not naive on the subject of COlnmunism. "The Japanese," he had commented publicly, "are only lice on the body of China, but Communism is a disease of the heart." Polit ically wise, he knew that the long-range struggle in China was not between China and Japan-that war was won when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor-but between Chinese inde pendence and subjugation to the international Communist rev olution. In the light of our present knowledge, the course which Rooseveltfollowed in China policy after the Casablanca Confer ence of January, 1943, seems incompatible with any conceivable pattern of American self-interestor even of plain common sense. It is the common practice of writers to blame General George C. Marshall· and his 1945-46 "Mission" for the master blunders which opened China to Communism. Without exonerating Marshall in the slightest, it is only fair to point out that he was simply following the China line which Roosevelthad prescribed CAIRO 201 as earlyas 1943. It was Roosevelt,leaningupon such LeftWing advisers as Owen Lattimore, Lauchlin Currie and, John Carter Vincent, and the now infamous Davies-Service clique in the Foreign Service,who decided arbitrarily, sometime in 1943,that it would be desirable to turn China over to Communism, at least in part, by forcing Chiang Kai-shek to take the Chinese Commu nists into his national government under the form of coalition!

At a desk in the White House sat Lauchlin Currie, a confiden tial administrative assistant of the President, handling Far East ern affairs. This man had not always been an American, and we may presume that his attachment to American citizenship was lessthan passionate,for the day was to come, after the war, when he would shake the soil of America from his shoes, shift his residence and activities to Colombia, South America, and see his American citizenship lapse after five years. (After the spy dis closures of 1948, in which there was testimony placing him in the savermaster espionage cell, Currie saw fit to depart for South America and remain there.) But during his White House interlude, under the warm wing of Mr. Roosevelt and with the benign smile of the First Lady and close contact with Harry Hopkins to give him confidence from day to day, "Lauch" (as the President called him)5 was well placed to be of service to people.

However, Lauchlin Currie's idea of a good deed for the day was not exactly that of a Boy Scout. Joining Harry Dexter White and Nathan Witt as a reference for Nathan Gregory Silvermas ter was the type of thing that appealed to him; and when 1fili tary Intelligence (G-2), outraged at seeing Silvermaster in a sensitivegovernment post, made a secret security report on him, pointing out that he was known and listed in the files of the Se attle and San Francisco police departments, the Thirteenth Naval District, the American Legion, and the F.B.I. as a menl ber and leader of the Communist Party and concluding that 202 WASTEBASKET ROAD "the overwhelming .•. testimony of the many and varied wit nesses and sources indicates beyond reasonable doubt that Nathan Gregory Silvermaster is now, and has for years, been a member and a leader of the Communist Party and very proba blya secret agent of the OGPU," it was Currie who intervened in Silvermaster's favor, successfully,to keep him in the govern ment. To assisthimself, Currie selected one Michael Greenberg, a fransplanted Britisher. Greenberg was indeed a sort of "ex pert" on the Far East, but it also happened to be the case that he had been a trained Communist for many years. He, too, felt enough at home in his new milieu to write letters on White House stationery.6 Naturally, such men had plans for China. In 1943,the gambit was "coalition." The coalition concept is now so thoroughly dis credited in the free world's mind that it is difficult to recapture the almost suicidal trustfulness with which Roosevelt welcomed it. Coalition appealed to the President because it gave him the illusion that he had settled his hard problems without open col lision with Stalin over postwar aims. It was an attractive device for sweeping the dust under the bed instead of cleaning it up.

The fact that the coalition expedient merely postponed the show downs into the future, while strengthening Communism in the meantime, was not the kind of thing that could keep this man awake nights. He was breathing the intoxicating incense of pres ent glory and apparent success; the future he would leave to his successors~ It was at Cairo that Roosevelt first notified the beleaguered Chiang Kai-shek that he must take the Communists into his cabinet. No word of this historic sabotage appears in the dis creetly worded communique which the conferees issued after the meeting. It was done clandestinely, as part of an under-the table deal Roosevelt was attempting while Churchill was out of the room. Elliott Roosevelt, perhaps indiscreetly, reveals what CA.IRO 203 was in his father's mind when he came face to face with the ChinesePresident; it was to wrest from Chiang a pledgeto ap pease the Communists. "Father" confided to Elliott: "You see, he [Chiang] wants very badly to get our support against the Brit ish moving into Hongkong and Shanghai and Canton with the same old extraterritorial rights they enjoyed before the war."

Elliott asked if "Father" would give that support. "Not for n<?th ing," cried "Father." He then told Elliott he had complained to Chiang about the character of his government: I'd told him it was hardly the modern democracy that ideally it should be. I'd told him he would have to form a unity government, while the war was still being fought, with the Communists in Yenan. 7 It is a measure of Franklin D. Roosevelt's statesmanship and his semantics that he saw a gain for "democracy" in empowering the Communists. With equal unreality, another idee fixe was germinating in Franklin D. Roosevelt'smind at this time. He was about to begin the frenzied imploration of the Russians to enter a Japanese war which only stern American opposition could have kept them out of when the time came to grab the spoils. In August, 1942, AvereH Harriman had asked Stalin for a pledge of eventual en trance into the Japanese War. The shrewd Russian had put him off with a vague promise,s which he repeated to another Roose velt envoy, General Patrick J. Hurley, in November.9 Hull says that Stalin stated in October, 1943, that he would "help defeat Japan" after Germany was beaten/o but Stalin was not asked what his intentions would be in the Far East after Japan's defeat.

Now, at the end of 1943, all the logic of the situationcalledfor extreme vigilance to keep the Russians out of the Far East. In stead, President Roosevelt, egged on constantly by Harry Hop kins, was preparing to invite, entice, and even bribe them to come in. And simultaneously, at Cairo, as we have seen, he 204 WASTEBASKET ROAD started to pull the rug out from under anti-Communist govern ment of China. Roosevelt,as usual, was busy thinking up ways to make Stalin happy. So at Cairo, we are informed by Averell Harriman, he proposed to Chiang that China give the Russians the use of the port of Dairen. l1 Chiang naturally dodged this blow, but it was a grim foretaste of the Roosevelt technique. It is the common impression. that Dairen was yielded to Russia at Yalta under duress by a reluctant Roosevelt. The truth is even more discred itable. Roosevelt offered it. He had liked the idea at Cairo, and at Teheran he opened the door to this and all the later conces sions demanded by Stalin at the expense of China.

The military discussions at Cairo concerned a project-to' which Roosevelt had already committed himself-to reconquer Burma and open the Burma Road into China. The idea was that the Chinese would invade Burma from acrossthe Salween River, and American General Stilwell would lead four crack Chinese divisions being trained in India through the jungles of northern Burma. At the same time, the British were to undertake an am phibious operation acrossthe Bay of Bengal. It was both a roman tic plan and "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's obsession. Prime Minister Churchill had no stomach for it. Why should British forces be sent to fight the Japanese? Japan would lose the war in due time anyway. So he talked again about Rhodes and the Balkans-or veering toward "the right" from Italy-and he wanted any available British naval strength to concentrate in the eastern Mediterranean, not the Bay of Bengal. He was not pleased that Roosevelt had invited the Chinese to Cairo. "The talks of the British and American Staffs were sadly distracted by the Chinese story, which was lengthy, complicated and minor,"

his memoirs moan. "All hope of persuading Chiang and his wife to go and see the pyramids and enjoy themselves until we CAIRO 205 returned from Teheran fell to the ground, with -the result that the Chinese business occupied first instead of last place at Cairo.,n2 As for President Roosevelt,he was on his way to make a favor able impression on Marshal Stalin, and the last thing he wanted to talk about at this moment-was an Anglo-American invasion of the Balkans. The American delegation saw plainly that the dogged Prime Minister was resuming the advocacy of strategic diversions into southeastern Europe and away from northern France. "They prepared themselves," says Sherwood, "for the battles at Teheran in which the Americans and the Russians would form a united front. "13 "The Chinese business," w:hichso irked Churchill, was a com edy of motives. He was opposed to ANAKIM (the Burma cam paign) because he wanted to use the British ·strength elsewhere.

Roosevelt favored ANAKIMbecause he did not want British strength to be sent where Churchill wanted to send it. Chiang Kai-shek took a long-range view; he perceived that the opening of the Burma Road to his stronghold in China would -enhance his prestige, bring a seasoned, loyal, well-equipped army home, and reinforce his capacity to deal with the Communists as the war ended. At the same time, Roosevelt was pressuring Chiang to merge with the Communists, for a secret price, at the expense of the British. If this seemsfantastic, particularly since the Cairo Conference had the outward appearance of a love feast of dedicated allies, Sherwood's analysis gives a candid answer. In Southeast Asia, he says,uthc Britishand Americanswere fightingtwo different wars for different purposes}and the Kuomintang Government was fighting a third war for purposes largely its oUln."14-This would have been a stunning revelation to the American people if it·had been made while the war, or wars, were -in progress.

206 WASTEBASKET ROAD Actually, there was a multiplicity of wars in Europe and Asia as a whole, and the pseudo-alliance of America, Britain, China, and Russia was a tissue of cross-purposes. The upshot was characteristic. The talks produced what Sher wood calls "a semblance of agreement" that ANAKIM would be carried out. As Admiral Leahy points out, "the commitment had been made months before." He adds: "Chiang left Cairo for Chungking fully expecting his allies to make good their prom ises."15 This corroborates Sherwood's assertion that when the Generalissimo and the Madame departed, their hopes were high that this time China's demands would be met with more than "mere words." These hopes were short lived. Rooseveltand Churchill stopped at Cairo again on the way home from Teheran. They tossed the ANAKIM plan into the wastebasket. As Sherwood puts it, "Rooseveltfelt impelled to renege on his own promise to Chiang Kai-shek, made ten days previously."16 Why? Because Roosevelt had talked with Stalin in the inter val. Russia was intending to come into the Japanese War herself.

(Sherwood admits that this was "the most important factor.") 17 A strengthened Chinese Nationalist government would hardly fit in with Stalin's long-term plans for China. The consequences soon proved to be catastrophic. The Japan ese, relieved of uncertainty over Burma, mounted their most formidable offensive against China in five years. It carried their troops. forward on a fifteen-hundred mile front between the Yangtze and the frontiers of Indochina. It wiped out strongholds in Southeast China which had withstood the Japanese since 1938 and airfields used by the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force under General Claire L. Chennault in Hunan, Kwangsi, and Yunnan. This blow, coming in the final year of the war after seven years of agonized Chinese resistance, almost knocked Chiang· out of the war. Only his stout heart, the fortunate assignment of GenCAIRO 207 era1Albert C. Wedemeyer to Chungking,and the valor of such men as General Chennault saved the disaster from becoming total.

By inducing Chiang to focus upon Burma and then walking out on him, his allies imposed an impossiblewar plan upon him. His best troops were on the Burma frontier. He was drawn to the south. Yet it has always been true that he who controls the north of China controls China. The Communists were fever ishly busy there. When the war ended, they were either en trenched in or contiguous to the important areas and in direct contact with the Russians. Bereft of the logistical support he had expected from his allies, Chiang was never able to recover the military advantage over Mao Tse-tung and the Red Army. The return to Cairo, after Teheran, also concerned another neighbor of the Soviet Union. For a long time Churchill had been avid to get Turkey to join the Allies, as part of his strategy to penetrate southeastern Europe, but President inonii of Tur key was a cautious fence-sitter. Roosevelt had never shown any enthusiasm for going into that part of Europe, so when inonii came to see Roosevelt and Churchill at Cairo, he was friendly, but he committed none of Turkey's fifty divisions. To Church ill's bitter disappointment, Roosevelt contributed nothing but smiles to the interview, and inonii departed.

Before he left Cairo for home, Roosevelt made one historic decision which it is generally believed pleased Churchill. He selected General Dwight D. Eisenhower to command OVER LORD. This choice was against "the almost impassioned ad vice" of Harry Hopkins, who preferred Marshall for the job.ls Admiral Leahy, Admiral King, and General Arnold had all hoped that Marshall would not be appointed.19 We now know from the war diary of Field Marshal Viscount Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, that Brooke did not have a high opinion of Marshall as a strategist. 20 The 208 WASTEBASKET ROAD Hopkins-Marshall team had consistently bucked Churchill in favor of strategy pleasing to Stalin. It is probable that strong British pressure upon Roosevelt accounts for the unexpected ap pointment of Eisenhower. Marshall was placated with this Pres idential compliment: "I feel 1 could not sleep with you out of the country."

As Chief of Staff, Marshall continued to be a powerful figure. If we are to accept Field Marshal Brooke's final appraisal, Eisen hower's skill lay in harmonizing the diverse elements which planned and carried out the invasion. "He learned a lot during the war, but tactics, strategy and command were never his strong points.... As Supreme Commander what he may have lacked in military ability he greatly made up for by the charm of his personality."21 Be that as it may, Eisenhower went on to become a national hero and the President of his country. That he owed much to Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision at Cairo in December, 1943, will never be denied. Perhaps a lingering gratitude is the reason why, in the Presidential office,he protected the Roosevelt repu tation with a solicitude which is not helpful to historical re search. The Teheran papers, shrouded in the State Department's files under lock and key, were to be revealed. They never were.