Oral History Interview with
Dr. Walter H. Judd
Physician and missionary with experience in China, 1925-31
and 1934-38, member of Congress from Minnesota, 1943-62. United States
delegate to the 12th General Assembly of the United Nations, 1957.
April 13, 1970
by Jerry N. Hess
[Notices and Restrictions | Interview
Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
NOTICE
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry
S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee
but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember
that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written
word.
As an electronic publication of the Truman Library, users should note
that features of the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview,
such as pagination and indexing, could not be replicated for this online
version of the Judd transcript.
RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced
for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission
of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Opened January, 1975
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri
[Top of the Page | Notices
and Restrictions | Interview Transcript
| List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
Dr. Walter H. Judd
Washington, DC
April 13, 1970
by Jerry N. Hess
[1]
HESS: Dr. Judd, we're primarily interested in your relationship with
former President Truman. Just what was that relationship and when did
it begin?
JUDD: I had met Mr. Truman a few times at official functions in Washington
when I first came here as a member of Congress in January 1943. I had
no personal contacts with him, directly, until he and I traveled
together in the summer of 1943 .
A group of us in Congress were concerned that the United States not go
back into isolationism after World War II. I had been a young soldier
in World War I, and he had been a captain in the field artillery, and
when we got to know each other better, we talked about our various military
experiences. He felt, as did I, that we had made
[2]
a mistake in 1918 and '19 when we imagined that we could pull back from
the world, not recognizing our own situation in the world had changed.
We were now a creditor nation instead of a debtor nation. We had
to have dealings with other countries if they were to pay their debts
to us. We had invented the steamboat and the airplane which had
destroyed our physical separation from the rest of the world, the separation
that George Washington and others had had earlier, which allowed them
to concentrate on domestic problems and to forget pretty much the rest
of the world.
So, a group of Republican Senators, [Joseph H.] Ball of Minnesota and
[Harold H.] Burton of Ohio, and Democratic Senators, [Lister] Hill of
Alabama and [Carl A.] Hatch of New Mexico, introduced a resolution in
the Senate in 1943 which was called the Ball-Burton-Hill-Hatch, or B2H2
Resolution. As I recall, it merely declared it to be the sense of the
Congress that the United States should cooperate with other nations after
World War II to bring into being a world organization through which the
peace-loving nations could pool their strength against lawless or aggressive
actions by any nation. No one country could now run the whole world. England
with her fleet had been able to for about a hundred years, but
[3]
that day had gone. England didn't have the strength, she was too exhausted
by two wars and there were too many other powers in the world. We either
had to have such an international organization that would be effective
or the United States would have to try to do it by itself, which the United
States couldn't do indefinitely. We didn't have the resources (we're discovering
that now), and second, we didn't have the patience. If we could move into
a trouble spot quickly and get it over with, okay, but if unrest or threats
to the peace were to drag on a long time, Americans by and large don't
have the stomach for long, drawn-out struggles, as we're learning in Vietnam.
Well, this was the sentiment of many of us. By the summer of 1943 it
was reasonably clear that Hitler was not going to succeed in conquering
Europe. He had failed to get Stalingrad in 1941 and Baku oil wells in
'42 and '43. He was retreating in Europe. By that time it was also clear
that Japan was not going to win control of the Pacific. She had shot her
bolt against the United States and been defeated at Midway. In her drive
toward Australia she had been defeated in the Coral Sea. We had recovered
from Pearl Harbor, rebuilt our fleet, and were beginning our march, island
by island, back across the Pacific.
[4]
So, it was time then to think about the future. There were six or eight
in the Senate and six or eight in the House who were particularly concerned.
It was my belief that we had to have some kind of a world organization
to get order and peace in our world, the same as we had to have organization
in our own country and in our communities if we were going to have order
and peace here. This concern had been the major reason why I had given
up my profession and gone into political life. So, we gradually worked
out, that spring of 1943, a plan to have some bipartisan teams go out
through the country talking about this issue--grassroots education if
you wish. Naturally, since it was a bipartisan resolution it would be
wise to have on each team a Republican and a Democrat. If the Republican
was a Senator, the Congressman would be a Democrat and vice versa. I was
assigned first with Senator Carl Hatch, one of the authors of the resolution.
He was a Democratic Senator from New Mexico, and I was a Republican Congressman
from Minnesota.
We started in July out in Iowa, Davenport, Fort Dodge, Mason City and
so on. Something came up about the third or fourth day that required Senator
Hatch to leave, and in the emergency, they sent out Senator Truman.
[5]
He hadn't been on one of the regular teams because he wasn't very much
of a speaker and he wasn't as well-known as Senator Hatch, but he was
interested in this cause and so they sent him to take Carl Hatch's place.
He joined me at Des Moines on a Friday, as I recall. spoke in the morning
at Simpson College, a Methodist college in Indianola, twenty miles or
so south of Des Moines. We spoke at a joint luncheon of the Chamber of
Commerce, Rotary and other clubs in Des Moines at noon. The Governor of
Iowa was Bourke Hickenlooper, and he introduced us. The next year he was
elected to the Senate, where he became a very close associate of President
Truman.
Then we spoke somewhere else in the afternoon, Drake University, I believe,
and in the evening at Iowa State University at Ames. From there on we
were on the circuit together.
HESS: Whit kind of an impression did Senator Truman make as a speaker?
JUDD: Well, this brings up an interesting story. He had a speech all
written out--and the first two or three times he pretty much read it.
He and I had talked a little over the phone before he
[6]
joined me and I told him the pattern that Carl Hatch and I had worked
out. Since the resolution was a Senate resolution, and dealt more specifically
with treaties which the Senate would have to approve, maybe the best thing
would be to have me speak first on why we had to have a world organization,
and then the Senator would follow with how to achieve it. President
Truman and his staff had prepared his speech along those lines. We usually
had about twenty minutes apiece for a forty minute appearance, a little
longer when we could expand it in evening meetings, and a little shorter
at luncheons. He's not a very dramatic speaker, either when he's reading
or when he's speaking ad lib. In private conversation the words just come
along, but not so well before an audience. He wasn't trained to be a speaker.
He was a businessman.
So, after about the third or fourth occasion, he always started his speech
with a story. I'd try to get them steamed up as to why we couldn't go
back to the isolationist pattern of the past. Then he'd get up and tell
this story. I bet he told it the last fifteen speeches we made together.
He said, "For me to make a speech following this stem-winder, Judd, always
makes me feel like the man
[7]
who went to the funeral of his wife and the undertaker told him he'd
have to ride to the
cemetery in the same car with his mother-in-law. He protested, but the
undertaker insisted there was no other place for him to ride." And then
Mr. Truman would always scratch his head and go on, "Well," the old fellow
said, "I can do it, but it sure is going to spoil the whole day
for me."
That story always went over with a bang and gave him a good entree. He
always had his facts well thought out and assembled, but he had no oratorical
gifts. It was straight-forward, declarative sentences, factual. After
he got them with this introduction he was very convincing. We enjoyed
that trip--I did--very greatly and I have reason to believe he did too.
In several places in those days they weren't as thoughtful about accommodations
as they generally are now. For example, I remember in the Cornhusker Hotel
in Lincoln, Nebraska, they gave us the nearest they had, I guess, to a
Presidential suite. We had twin beds in the same room. Every night on
the road he'd call up Bess. I couldn't avoid hearing him talk to her over
the telephone because I just happened to be in the same room. He never
was embarrassed, and I have the greatest admiration for the obvious devotion
and affection and trust that he had for his wife. They were a great pair.
[8]
It was certainly a most happy and successful marriage. You find out what
a fellow is like down deep, when you hear him talking to his own wife
about his family or whatever. He's not a man with inhibitions. If he felt
indignant about something he'd let you have it. He'd let her have it too,
I suppose, if he felt that way.
We would talk one place in the morning or at noon and talk at another
place that evening. We drove, for example, from Topeka, Kansas over to
Emporia where we were to be that night; and the next day, in the morning,
we drove from Emporia to Wichita where we were to be at noon and then
to Salina, Kansas in the afternoon. We visited a prison camp there with
a thousand or so Nazi prisoners that we had captured from [Field Marshal
Erwin] Rommel in North Africa. Mr. Truman was very interested as was I
in seeing those prisoners from across the fence. We couldn't talk to them
but the spectacle of them and us, persons of the same race and culture
and so on, so bitterly opposed to each other because of their having been
taken over by the fellow Hitler, made one think.
There's a story here I perhaps ought to put on the record. We were in
Omaha one night and the next day a Sunday, we were to be in Grand Island
and Hastings, Nebraska. They're cities fifty
[9]
and seventy-five miles west of my family home at Rising City, Nebraska,
which is seventy-five miles west of Omaha. We spent Saturday night in
Omaha and I asked him if he would object to having Sunday dinner, good
fried chicken or something of that sort, at my country home where my father
was still living. He said he'd be delighted. So, we drove there and had
a good home-cooked dinner at noon with homemade ice cream and so on. He
just loved it.
Because my father had been born in northwest Missouri, only the second
county away from Jackson County where Kansas City is, and lived there
until he was a teenager, he and Mr. Truman had some things in common and
they talked in a homespun way. I remember at the end of it, my father,
who was a strong Republican, and had been a great supporter of George
Norris in Republican politics in Nebraska, was very much impressed with
Truman and in his direct way he said to me, "Well whatever his views are
politically, I would trust him with my pocketbook." That was the finest
compliment my father, a pioneer out on the frontier, could pay; he would
trust Mr. Truman with his pocketbook.
After Hastings and Grand Island that afternoon and evening, we were to
speak in Kansas City the
[10]
next noon, Monday. Lo and behold, the Kansas City people objected to
Mr. Truman's speaking there: The Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary, Kiwanis
and perhaps Lions clubs wouldn't organize a luncheon if Mr. Truman was
to speak at it, even though it was his home town--or Independence is,
right outside it. The reason was this: it was right after they had had
a terrible political fight in Kansas City in which reform forces had rooted
out the Pendergast machine. That had been a pretty tough, rough machine,
such as city machines were for many, many decades in America; in New York,
Boston, Chicago, and so on. Well, Mr. Truman had been appointed judge--it
wasn't really a judicial job, it was a kind of county executive for Jackson
County--largely at the behest of the Pendergast machine. It had put Harry
Truman in to give itself respectability because he was a man who could
do it. I don't think anybody ever questioned his integrity. He
was, in some sense I suppose, a front for them, not intentionally on his
part. But that was, doubtless, their point of view. Well, Kansas City
leading citizens had fought so hard for so long and finally got the machine
out, they were not willing to honor what they considered a product of
the machine by sponsoring a big luncheon at which he spoke. Well, that
was the...
[11]
HESS: What did he say about that?
JUDD: He didn't know it. I don't think he knows it even yet. I'll tell
you how we got around it.
The people of Kansas City protested to the folks in Washington who were
setting up these B2H2 tours and they called to ask me what to do. I said,
"Well, maybe you could split us for that meeting." So, that is what happened.
They sent me to Kansas City for that noon and sent Mr. Truman to Topeka
and then they drove me to Topeka in the afternoon and picked him up and
we went on to Emporia for the evening, as I said earlier. The case was
presented like this, "Senator, you're in Kansas City all the time. That
is your home town. We've got a request also from Topeka for that noon.
So isn't it better to have Judd go to Kansas City, he's a new voice to
them, and you go to Topeka, and thus cover both of these places at one
luncheon?" It was smoothed over that way. And to the best of my knowledge,
he never knew the reason why.
That same afternoon when we were driving from Topeka to Emporia in a
police car with a state trooper we got to talking about Kansas City and
Pendergast and so on. He said, "You know, a lot of people jumped on me
[12]
when Pendergast died and I went out to his funeral. But Tom Pendergast
never asked me to do one dishonorable, or unworthy, or undercover thing,
in his life. And I must say he gave me the start by appointing me to that
judgeship out of which came my election to the United States Senate and
such career as I've had." (And I'm sure neither he nor I at that time
ever imagined that he was going to be President of the United States.
He had no ambition of that sort. That came out of the fight at the Democratic
convention the following year when the problem was how to get rid of Henry
Wallace whom they didn't want for another term as their Vice President.
Knowing Mr. Roosevelt's health was not good, the responsible Democrats
as well as other people didn't want Henry Wallace to succeed FDR as President.)
When Tom Pendergast died and Harry Truman went out to his funeral and
paid his respects--if you wish, honor--to the man, at least as his personal
friend, he knew there would be brickbats, and he got them because of it.
But he put his own values first, and loyalty to friends was certainly
one of his finest qualities.
As a result of that speaking trip together we were fairly close for the
next year or so, really until after the San Francisco conference in 1945
which set up the UN. A couple of times a year the
[13]
former team members would have a dinner together or we'd talk things
over, meet occasionally. But once the job had been accomplished, there
wasn't any reason why I should be in touch with him frequently.
I found in looking through my file, a letter he wrote to me on January
12, 1945. I had sent him a picture taken of us at the head table at the
luncheon in Omaha.
He wrote: "I certainly appreciate very much your letter of the second,
and am returning the picture signed as you suggested. I wish I could see
and talk with you. I think maybe I could make a good Democrat out of you
as I helped to do with Joe Ball. I know where both of you belong."? He
was suggesting that we belonged in the Democratic Party. Well, I didn't
on domestic matters, although I went along with the Democrats on foreign
policies more than I did with my own party at that time.
HESS: Why?
JUDD: Because the Republican Party was still substantially dominated
by people who thought that to be sound and conservative domestically meant
that you had to be isolationist internationally, and I was totally non-isolationist.
[14]
I had lived abroad--in Asia--for ten years. I knew that it was an impossible
policy for the United States. In fact my first vote in 1920 was for a
Democrat. Although I came from a Republican family, I voted for Cox and
Roosevelt in 1920, because of my support for the Democrats' effort to
get some kind of a world organization. I was sure there would be disaster
if we tried to withdraw from the world--and there was.
Then Truman added in the letter, "Please remember me to your father and
tell him I still think of him. He has a large portion of what it takes
to make America great, and that is good common sense. He has shown he
knows how to use it." I told you how he and my father got along, they
hit it off very well.
HESS: Now, was your trip mainly in the Midwest?
JUDD: Yes. It was Iowa and Nebraska and Kansas and Missouri and so on.
We wound up in--rather he left me--after Salina, Kansas. He had to go
down to Texas for some Truman Committee business. This was about the 25th
of July 1943, I think, and he had some task having to do with the Truman
Committee. He got a telegram or a phone call, so he left and I carried
on alone the next two or three days, the rest of our schedule, and wound
up in St. Louis.
[15]
HESS: While you were with him did he ever say anything about what he
thought the importance of the Truman Committee was or…
JUDD: Oh, yes.
HESS: ...did he talk about the committee?
JUDD: Yes, he talked about it a good deal--and it was his work on the
Truman Committee which eventually made him President of the United States.
He was very, very loyal to the military, but he recognized that in wartime
you pull out all the stops no matter what it costs--you've just got
to get this, that, and the other thing--and without careful herd-riding
on the military there would be extravagance, duplication, overlapping,
as well as conflicts and tremendous waste. He was just as determined to
have an adequate and effective military machine as anyone could be, but
he was opposed to waste and the little internal bickering and quarrellings
that were going on. He was very proud of the committee's work. He said,
"We're saving the Government"--several times I heard him say, "countless
millions, if not billions of dollars, and getting better, greater military
strength in the process."
HESS: Regarding the B2 H2 Resolution, in your private conversations did
he ever tell you when
[16]
he first became interested, or saw the necessity for international cooperation?
JUDD: No. If he did I don't recall it.
HESS: Why do you think that he was interested in this at this time?
JUDD: Well, I think it was in what he said. You must have somewhere a
copy of that speech he gave. He had mimeographed copies that he gave out
to the press in every city. He varied it, but it was his basic speech.
I think it was probably worked out largely by the staff, because it was
that kind of a staff speech. It was not so much a sentimental or patriotic
appeal, as a hardheaded argument that the United States had grown up.
Its position in the world had changed. Look at the threats that had come
from the East and the West. Dorothy [Dr. Judd's secretary]--
That isn't the picture I was looking for, but I think those were taken
at the same time. We were getting off a plane. Oh, why in the heck, I
never put dates on them. I think this was taken out in Salina, Kansas,
at that great big air base there. I'm not sure.
HESS: At the door of the hanger it looks like.
JUDD: Yes.
[17]
HESS: The airplane is behind.
JUDD: Let me think who that fellow was. It may be Frank Schupp, he was
with the Foreign Affairs Committee. This is the patrolman that probably
drove us around. You see it's summer, we had straw hats on, and our bags.
HESS: Approximately how many stops and how many speeches did you make?
Do you recall?
JUDD: Oh, I would say altogether there were somewhere between fifteen
and twenty times when we spoke on the same platform. He started late because
Senator Carl Hatch was with me the first days. Then Mr. Truman had to
leave a couple of days before the end of the tour. It was a three week
tour, and he was with us as I recall, altogether coming late and leaving
early, probably two of the three weeks and we always did two and sometimes
four talks a day.
HESS: What do you recall about the origins of B2H2? Now, three of the
men served on the Truman Committee. Hill, Lister Hill, was the only man
who was not on the Truman Committee.
JUDD: Yes.
HESS: Was there any possible connection between...
[18]
JUDD: Well, I think it was largely their association on that committee
that they got to know each other very well. Truman's a friendly, informal,
chatty sort of person--he's not very sober or solemn or stiff--you get
to be very chummy when you work with Harry Truman, in a good sound way.
And I think it was their working together, seeing the awful costs in men
and materials and money of a war like this, the absolute necessity to
find some other way of resolving international difficulties than by having
wars every generation. We had had a war a generation earlier in which
he and I served personally and now we were having a second in which the
following generation was serving. We couldn't go on with this indefinitely.
I think it was largely that although I don't recall his ever saying that
he had previously had any different opinion and switched, or anything
of the sort. We just both agreed that this was necessary; I don't recall
our ever discussing how we got where we were in our views.
HESS: In checking over the New York Times last week on the B2H2,
I found an article which indicated that Senator Ball's co-authorship spread
the belief that the resolution has as its specific objective a world government,
and that the reason for this was that he was from Minnesota and then Governor
[Harold] Stassen, who had spoken along those lines, was also from Minnesota.
[19]
Do you think there is any connection between Governor Stassen's views
and Joe Ball's views?
JUDD: Yes. I don't think there's any question but that Governor Stassen
had a very great influence on Joe Ball. Joe Ball was a newspaper reporter
in Minnesota for the St. Paul papers. He covered Stassen while he was
Governor. When Senator Lundeen, Ernest Lundeen, was killed in a plane
accident, Harold Stassen appointed Joe Ball to his seat. Everybody was
surprised, greatly surprised, because Joe was regarded as a kind of run-of-the-mill
newspaper reporter. But Stassen had been close to him. They obviously
had had a good many hours of private conversation and he recognized Joe
Ball had great ability and insight and so he appointed him--I think that
Harold's world views did have a very great influence on the development
of those same views by Joe Ball.
I remember my own argument--if you'll wait another minute I'll...
HESS: All right.
JUDD: Here's the speech I made in St. Louis, the very last one, August
11--so it was later than I thought. It was taken down and reprinted by
a bank there and I...
[20]
HESS: Where was the last stop?
JUDD: In St. Louis, but Truman wasn't with me then, he'd left. So on
this one I expanded a bit because I had to cover the arguments of both
of us, my first part on why and his on how...
HESS: They didn't send another Senator out?
JUDD: No. There was only two or three days left. So I talked about the
reasons why we must have an international organization, how our country
now had been in a situation where it wasn't a choice of war or peace,
it was war or subjugation--in which case a nation chooses war. I pointed
out what our stake was. From the standpoint of our security and our world
trade and so on, in the future, we simply had to have a world of peace
and security. We had over expanded our productive capacity, both agricultural
and industrial, to produce for ourselves and the rest of the world, and
if we were now to come back to just the American market we'd have vast
unemployment and return of depression and so on.
"How can we preserve the peace after we have won it? How can we
prevent these periodic outbreaks of ever more violent and costly and
disastrous wars? Historically there have never been but three types
of security. The first was by individual armaments. Every man on these
plains carried a gun on his hip. But it did not give him adequate security
because two or three
[21]
others could always gang up against him. Therefore, he went on to the
second stage--alliances.
The cattle thieves and horse rustlers and highwaymen were allied in
gangs. Therefore, the law-abiding citizens had to form alliances also.
They were not ideal, they led at times to perversions of justice, to
vigilante groups, to lynch law. But on the whole they gave a greater
degree of security than just individual arms. It was the balance of
power system.
Then our forefathers, as this country became more thickly settled and
society became more complex, were wise enough to proceed to the third
stage, that of organized security. If a man wanted to be sure that his
wife and children had a maximum of security with a minimum cost of his
time and money, the way to do it was to join with his neighbors in organizing
the community to make sure there would be clean water for all, good
sewage disposal, good schools, good highways, good public health and
good police force. It was not because he was more interested in his
neighbor's wife than his own that he recognized it was part of his business
to see that the neighbor's wife was safe and secure: it was because
he was not sure of his own wife's safety unless he helped to build a
community of orderliness which would make every law-abiding person in
the area reasonably secure. Only when that had been achieved could he
give up carrying his gun.
America tried for twenty years to get along without any of the three
types of security. She wouldn't go into alliances with the nations whose
interests were nearest to ours, she would not join with other countries
in an attempt to get organized security, and then she gave up her own
gun. No wonder we are fighting for our lives..."
And so on. This was my basic argument. Then I got down to his part. I
said:
[22]
"Thoughtful Americans are working on this problem in every part
of our land and of our government. More than twenty resolutions have
been introduced into the two houses of Congress seeking to achieve this
end. I believe the one that has been introduced by Senator Ball in conjunction
with another Republican, Senator Burton of Ohio and two Democrats, Senator
Hatch of New Mexico and Hill of Alabama, is by far the best one, because
it is definite and specific and bipartisan. It sets forth what seems
to me to be the minimum on which we must achieve cooperation and agreement
if we are to have any hope of avoiding future war.
I want to discuss its chief provisions briefly, not because I'm interested
in it for itself, but because it helps point up our thinking and focus
our attention on what the real essentials of the problem are. Talk of
international collaboration that includes less than these essentials
is idle daydreaming..."
and so on.
"First it (the resolution) recognizes that the machinery set up
in our Constitution for making treaties and binding commitments with
other nations is a partnership--the executive and the United States
Senate--and that we operate under a two party system.
and so on."
HESS: What do you recall of President Roosevelt and the administration's
views regarding B2H2?
JUDD: Oh, they supported it wholeheartedly. I think they were wise enough
though, Mr. Roosevelt was very shrewd, not to grab it as just a Democratic
measure because if they did, politics being what it is, some Republicans
would say, "Well, we aren't going to support it
[23]
because it's a Democratic proposal." Very much in our mind when we developed
this crusade; was whether our President after the next election was to
be a Republican or a Democrat. The fact was, as I put it, we had to have
an American foreign policy. We've had four great basic foreign
policies, until recently. And they were all bipartisan, all American.
On our north, settle any disputes with Canada by mediation, negotiation,
arbitration and so on. On our south, the Monroe Doctrine--a determination
not to let any European or foreign systems or sovereignties get control
of substantial sections or even a good foothold in this hemisphere. The
world knew that this was an American policy. They knew that if
there was a change in administrations here it would not change that basic
policy, therefore it was dependable and credible.
In the Far East--on our west--our policy was "Maintaining the Open Door
in China." If China was free and independent, neither Japan nor Russia,
the only two countries that might threaten us, could move against us because
China was behind Japan and on Russia's southern flank. It was worked out
by a Republican administration, [William] McKinley and John Hay, his Secretary
of State. It was supported one hundred percent by President [Woodrow]
Wilson when
[24]
the Japanese tried to wreck it in 1915. Then again it was supported by
the Republicans in 1921-22 at the Washington Nine Power Conference; and
again by Democrats Roosevelt and [Cordell] Hull in 1940-41. They went
to war with Japan rather than let Japan get control of the manpower, territory
and resources of China because that would be too dangerous to ourselves.
Likewise we had a foreign policy toward Europe on our east. However,
we hadn't been so united on that one. It was a policy (from Washington's
day), of no permanent entangling alliances with Europe. It's often
called just, "No entangling alliances." But the word "permanent" was used
by both Jefferson and Washington. That is, let our alliances be determined
in each instance on the basis of our national interests at the time.
As Washington said, "Europeans have a set of historic interests or conflicts"
(some words like that) "that we don't have." If we were to be tied up
permanently with a given country, then we'd be called upon to defend
its policies which we had had no hand in helping develop. Therefore, in
the first war we were allied with the French against the British. In another
one we might be with the British against the Germans. No permanent
alliances. And we never did have any until
[25]
establishment of the NATO treaty in 1948, with a group of European countries.
But from Woodrow Wilson's time on there hadn't been as great cooperation
on European matters, or as much unity of thinking between the two parties
and their various leaders as previously. Our desire was to restore that
unity so we'd have on our east as well as on our north, south and west,
an American foreign policy that would be dependable and the world
would know that no matter which party was in power, this would be the
consistent policy of the United States.
I think history has proved that it was an extremely wise step to make
our effort bipartisan, and to include both executive and legislative branches,
and both House and Senate. This made it impossible for the San Francisco
conference, for example, to be thrust into partisan politics, as the Versailles
conference had been, partly because of intransigence on the part of President
Wilson, and on the other hand, of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. and others. Men
got their backs up. Each was going to run it his own way. One was the
chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, as [J. William] Fulbright
is now, and the other was President and they got into a tangle. It wasn't
so much, I think, because Democrat and Republican in the beginning, as
it was a personality clash. Each was
[26]
a number one man not willing to be number two. B2 H2 supporters were
determined that that wasn't going to happen again and I'm glad to say
that on matters of foreign policy, there's been very great unity in our
country these last decades.
Yes, some of the Democrats are off the reservation on this issue but
some Republicans are off on that. So it hasn't been a Republican-Democrat
clash all these postwar years, even when there was so much opposition
to Mr. Truman's withdrawal of MacArthur (which was a disaster, regarding
which I can give you some notes because I went to town on that). Nevertheless,
it wasn't made a Republican or Democratic thing. There were Democrats
in 1951 who opposed President Truman on that just as strongly as the Republicans
did.
HESS: You thought he was wrong in that?
JUDD: Sure. It was a disaster, we would never have been in Vietnam if
he hadn't done that.
HESS: Why?
JUDD: Because he pulled out MacArthur on the basis of an earlier decision
not to win in Korea. That made it possible for the Communists to get out
of Korea where they
[27]
couldn't win to shift to Southeast Asia where they could.
I made a statement in Congress the very day he pulled MacArthur out.
I had called President Truman and he had said to me, "Walter, I'm trying
to stop the war, not expand it."
I said, "I know that, Mr. President, but what you're doing, I predict,
will expand the war and not contain it," which is, of course, what it
did.
There couldn't have been a war in South Vietnam if we had kept them tied
up in Korea and defeated them there. Just as the war in Korea was the
unfinished China war, so the war in Vietnam is merely the unfinished Korean
war. The biggest mistake Truman made was his failure to finish up the
Korean war after sending our forces in and when he had the Communists
on the ropes there.
HESS: What should have been done?
JUDD: Just say to the Communists, "Call off this aggression or else we're
not going to respect any of your privileged sanctuaries beyond the Yalu
River." This is the way Ike got the fighting stopped about two years later.
He tried at first, like Truman, to get it stopped by talking at Panmunjom.
The Commies talked, talked, talked. He assumed that they came to negotiate
to end the war.
[28]
No, they came to talk, not to negotiate. For them such talk is a substitute
for negotiation, an evasion of negotiation. They came just to talk, talk,
talk, and wear us down, hoping thereby to win the war.
Mr. Truman tried to negotiate for a year and a half--from the summer
of '51 until he went out in January '53. Ike then tried for five or six
months, the same as Kennedy later tried for a while to negotiate on Vietnam
until he practically had to give up, and Johnson tried at Paris, and Nixon
is trying now. They don't succeed and they won't succeed that way in getting
a real peace.
So, Ike, when he found out that they were just trying to win the war
by stalling, sent word to them indirectly and without any public
notice, that if they didn't come and negotiate at Panmunjom meaningfully,
he would have, as I recall, seven words, "no inhibitions as to territory
and weapons." Well, that meant in very plain language that if they didn't
negotiate meaningfully and stop this fighting and get it over with, he
wouldn't have any inhibitions on territory, which meant beyond the Yalu
River--he would attack their main bases in Manchuria or even in mainland
China itself. On weapons, he wouldn't have any inhibitions, he'd use whatever
weapons were necessary.
[29]
HESS: Do you think that the use of atomic weapons would have been justified?
JUDD: No, and they weren't needed. There were no targets there to need
or justify the use of atomic weapons. Atomic weapons were always brought
up during the arguments in this country, just as later in the case of
Vietnam. There isn't a single target down there either that would need
or justify use of atomic weapons. That's a non sequitur. There are other
kinds of weapons that are enormously effective in such a war.
The Communists weren't sure that Ike meant business so they stalled,
as usual. He sent over some old planes with some conventional bombs and
broke a couple of irrigation dams in North Korea, flooded two valleys,
endangered their food supply, and they came right down and agreed to a
truce. This was the way to end the fighting.
Mr. Truman's attempt to contain the war in Korea, or stop it by pulling
out MacArthur while protecting the enemy's supply bases was bound to expand
the war. The same as if we pull out of Vietnam in an indecisive way, it
won't end the struggle, it will prolong and expand it, we'll have more
killed. If we follow the kids who are now advocating, and the so-called
"peace forces," that we pull out of Vietnam right away, more people are
[30]
going to be dead as a result of it, not fewer. That way hasn't worked
a single time. The only way to end a war with this kind of an adversary
is when you prevail to the point where he has to call off his aggression
because it's too dangerous and expensive to him not to. As long as he's
secure in North Vietnam, protected by us there while free to keep on killing
in the South, and can count on the doubts and divisions and demonstrations
in the United States to weaken our resolve to the point where we will
give in step by step, why should he stop the war?
It sounds harsh to say, perhaps, but the number one obstacle to peace
right now is the eagerness of some Americans for peace. Our eagerness
for peace tells the adversary to keep on killing and America will give
in. These folks that really think they're for peace have the blood of
thousands of dead American boys on their hands. I don't know whether they
will stand up and take responsibility for it, probably they won't, but
they have it.
This was Mr. Truman's great mistake in Korea--he yielded largely to the
pressure of [Clement] Attlee of Great Britain, I have reason to believe.
Attlee came over here in December, as I recall, of 1950 and got Truman's
commitment not to go beyond the Yalu River. Of course, as soon as he
[31]
got back, it was known to the other side, so the other side was free
to keep on killing, knowing we weren't going to attack them in Manchuria.
Actually there was no incentive for them to stop the bleeding of the American
side when they knew it was safe for them to do so.
HESS: Why would Attlee have that view?
JUDD: Well, he had the fear, as did many here, that if we bombed the
Communist lines of supply in Manchuria, the Soviet Union might intervene.
That, of course, was possible, but unlikely. We had plenty of atomic weapons
and the Soviets have consistently refrained from committing their own
forces against us. And Attlee had the same view that many of the liberals
in our country have, that you can get peace just by wanting peace and
refusing to use our armed force effectively. If we say we won't go to
war, that will bring peace. But that doesn't bring peace. I think this,
if I may say so, is one of the basic difficulties in the background of
Senator Fulbright.
He was in Oxford during the '30s when thousands of Oxford and Cambridge
boys signed statements saying, "Never again will we bear arms for king
or country." They
[31a]
thought it was possible to get peace by saying, we won't fight. Fulbright
came home and apparently he still believes that. But the English boys
stayed there and it wasn't very long until they saw Hitler's planes coming
over. They discovered the choice wasn't war or peace, it was war or subjugation.
They decided to fight for king and country and they fought as brilliantly
and sacrificially
[32]
and heroically as any men in history. But Fulbright still, as in the
1930's, believes that you can get peace just by saying that you won't
go to war. That doesn't give you peace, that gives you either war or subjugation.
It gives the green light to the adversary. But when they see real danger
either from within or without (the danger is there now, but it isn't visible
to most people)--I don't care what anti-war declarations our people have
signed--they'll go for the defense of this country, unless by that time
it may be too late. I hope not.
HESS: One of the disagreements between President Truman and General MacArthur
was concerning the use of Chiang Kai-shek's troops on Formosa.
JUDD: Yes, but that wasn't the main one. MacArthur felt that when Chinese
forces are there and available, why in the world don't we use them? Asians
against Asians instead of white boys against Asians.
I am partly responsible I suppose for that difficulty in that, right
after the invasion of Korea began, the administration in the next two
days came out with a six point declaration which said, with respect to
Formosa, that the United States, in order not to spread the war, would
prevent any military action across the Formosan
[33]
straits. It said that our Seventh Fleet would prevent Red China from
attacking Taiwan and called upon the government of Free China on Taiwan
not to take any action against the mainland. And then in a completely
insulting and totally unnecessary way, it added "The Seventh Fleet will
see that this is done." That, of course, greatly weakened Chiang Kai-shek.
It made him look as if he were just a puppet of the United States. It
wasn't necessary--there hadn't been any instances where Chiang failed
to cooperate with us (except when a clique within our State Department
tried to make him be a traitor and turn his country over to Communist
control). All we needed to do was ask him not to, and quit there. But
no, the bitter boys in the Department who thought they had buried Chiang
Kai-shek found we now needed him. So they added the barb, "The Seventh
Fleet will see that this is done." That is, "You'll do as we tell
you whether you like it or not. Your own country, Chiang, doesn't count,
you're going to do what the United States says." One of the most
insulting and totally unnecessary sentences I ever read. This kind of
arrogance is what makes people all over Asia have grave dislike for us,
if not distrust. The statement at that time contributed to it greatly.
Some of us House Members went down to see Mr. Truman
[34]
in December of that year--four Democrats and four Republicans. As I recall,
Nixon was one of the Republicans. I largely organized the group and wanted
it to be bipartisan. It was right after the Chinese Communists had come
into the war in Korea. We wanted Truman to allow the Chinese on Formosa
to make trouble in Red China's rear or flank. The Chinese were killing
our boys in Korea. They knew perfectly well it was safe to intervene because
Mr. Truman, through Attlee, had given assurance that we would not go beyond
the Yalu River. We would not attack China, so China was freed to attack
us.
It is the same in Vietnam now. The pressures to stop the bombing in North
Vietnam and to reduce all offensive action in South Vietnam is what has
freed North Vietnam to expand the war into Laos. I don't know why Fulbright
doesn't get up and take credit for the Laotian war. As long as North Vietnam
was so busy watching her homeland and tied up in South Vietnam, she didn't
take on Laos. Now, she's free to take on Laos. Our desire to limit the
war expands the war.
Well, the eight of us went down to see President Truman and we asked
him, why not use these Chinese troops? I had always opposed using white
boys on the mainland of China--or the mainland of Asia, against non-Caucasians.
[35]
HESS: Chiang . . .
JUDD: Use whosever troops are on our side.
I wanted to help the Koreans before the invasion, but instead
of that we wouldn't supply them adequately. We didn't build the South
Korean forces up and then we took our own troops out--every last American
soldier in 1949. I fought, bled--and lost--trying to get us not to pull
all our troops out of Korea. The Administration said, "Well, Korea's not
essential to us; we can do anything from Japan that we could do from Korea;
and to have our forces in Korea may be provocative to the Soviet Union."
I said, "That's true of West Berlin also; they can take Berlin any weekend.
We haven't got enough troops there to stop them. Why don't they do it?
Because we do have one regiment in Berlin--and the American flag. That's
all, but it's a symbol of American power and interest. If we take everything
out of Berlin, that gives them the green light to come in. So we keep
American forces in West Berlin--and the flag."
I remember begging, "Leave at least a platoon under a few sergeants in
Seoul as the evidence of America's determined interest in the survival
of that little country which is largely our own creation." Instead, we
took
[36]
every last soldier out and thereby invited the invasion. I said in Committee;
"Well, if we do take them all out, within a year I bet you will have to
send them back." I missed it by three days. Ike later mentioned that in
a public speech.
I don't know where this notion comes from that weakness on our part will
somehow persuade the other people to give up their strength. If, when
they're truculent and arrogant and tough it's demonstrated that those
attitudes succeed, why should they abandon the belligerence which succeeds
to adopt a weak and conciliatory and peace-loving attitude which fails?
We encourage the very thing we want to avoid. We always project our codes
of American sportsmanship and decency into the minds of people who have
rejected those codes. And then we're outraged when they live according
to their codes of trickery, not ours of decency.
Well, Mr. Truman, when we proposed that, I remember the sentence so well,
said, "We will if we have to." That is, we will use Chiang Kai-shek if
we have to. There was our policy toward a faithful ally--all in one sentence.
The Chinese knew this. They knew that we didn't want to treat them as
allies; we hated their guts; we really hoped their island of Formosa would
disappear. But
[37]
if necessary to save us, we'd use them, let them shed their blood
to save ours. And some still wonder why Asians don't trust us.
Those were his very words, "We will if we have to." Which meant that
we will hold up old Chiang at the end of a thread--he and his cause have
no merit of their own--just in case we might eventually need him. But,
please God, we won't and then we can let go of the thread and let him
sink beneath the sea. Well, the Chinese are a little tougher than some
realized. One of the biggest assets we've got in Asia right now is Taiwan.
Thank God we've got Taiwan on our side.
As Ike once wrote to me, later, "We aren't giving all this assistance
to Taiwan just out of any special affection"(that's not quite his word),
"for the Chinese regime on Taiwan, but because of its importance to the
whole area. The day might come when those forces will be needed elsewhere
in Asia."
I've got that letter that Ike wrote about '55 or '56. But Mr. Truman
didn't see that point. He listened to the boys in the State Department.
I'll go over, if you want the notes on a fairly extensive conversation
I had with President Truman which was only about half a year before the
Korean thing broke out. We were pulling
[38]
out of Korea and pulling the chain on Taiwan and I tried to prevent his
doing it, but he went right ahead with his action the following week.
HESS: You have those notes?
JUDD: Yes.
HESS: Fine.
JUDD: I'll put them in if you want.
HESS: Very good.
JUDD: This was a call that I had--telephone conversation--with President
Truman on December 30, 1949. I extended Christmas and New Year's greetings.
I said I was calling about Taiwan (Formosa as most called it then), because
the papers had reported that he was extending the Truman Doctrine to Asia,
and if that was so I wanted to express my appreciation and congratulations.
I said, "There are two lessons from Europe. One is that Communism tends
to fall apart if it's stopped."
He said, "Yes."
And I said, "The second is that you can't stop Communist expansion without
assistance all along the line, including support of some governments we
don't like."
[39]
And he interrupted to say, "Yes, and that's exactly what we have done
in China."
You see at the time he proposed the Truman Doctrine for Europe--I'm interrupting
myself now--Walter Lippmann and a whole group of "liberals" opposed him
bitterly because the government in Greece wasn't a good enough government
to suit them. It was corrupt, it was ineffective, it was rotten, it was
semi-fascistic, it was divided, it looked like any government. does that's
gone through years of war and invasion. It was a mess. It took fifty years
for Georgia to recover from one year under Sherman, and yet we expected
Greece, or Chiang Kai-shek to come out from eight years of invasion
and occupation by the Japanese and be all streamlined overnight.
I argued that you can't save Europe in the end unless you save Asia too.
You have got to contain both ends of the barrel if you want to contain
either. The Truman policy in Europe was to help independent and friendly
governments, even like the Greek Government. It wasn't as good as we'd
like, but it was at least Greek, and it was fighting for Greek independence.
It wasn't part of the world Communist conspiracy which was our enemy.
Truman was right with the Truman Doctrine and we supported him in it.
The Greek Government pulled through as it couldn't have without our assistance.
[40]
I wanted him to adopt the same policy in Asia. I said to him, "In Europe
we didn't say to the Greeks, or the Italians, or the French when those
countries were hanging on the ropes, "We'll help you if you take the Communists
into your government." Instead we said, "We'll help you if you keep the
Communists out of your government. If you're resolutely against Communist
expansionism in your area, we will support you." The policy was right,
it opposed Communism, it succeeded.
But Truman did the exact opposite in Asia. He tried to appease Communism.
He sent [General George C.] Marshall to China to tell the Chinese we wouldn't
help them unless they took the Communists into their government. His policy
was right in Europe, it succeeded. His policy was wrong in Asia, it failed.
And I said, "You can't stop Communism and have it fall apart unless you
resist all along the line, including the support of some governments we
don't like," and I'm reading again from my notes.
He interrupted to say, "Yes and that's exactly what we have done in China."
I said I thought not. In Greece we allowed our advisers, for example,
to participate as observers in actual operations and to "train and advise
at all levels."
[41]
But we hadn't done that in China. He interrupted to say, "Why, we've
done the same thing in China as in Greece. But in Greece they'd follow
our advice, but in China they wouldn't follow our advice."
And I said, "Well, Generals Lucas and [Albert C.] Wedemeyer and others
have told me something different, Mr. President."
He said, "Well, you can dig up all the reports you want to support your
position, but I know what I'm talking about."
I said, "Well, I'm afraid, sir, you may have been misinformed." He boils
up, you know.
But I happened to know more in some respects than he did. I'd taken the
trouble to find out personally on the ground. He had the whole world at
his fingertips, but through others; I knew about some things that he didn't
know.
For example, after he sent our first commander, General Rawlins (if that
was his name) to Greece in the spring of 1947, we had disaster for six
months--I was there in September or October that year. Then he sent over
[General James] Van Fleet, and changed his directive. He added six words,
authorizing him to "...advise and train at all levels." That's the change
that
[42]
enabled us to save Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Previous to
that time, Rawlins told us, he sat in Athens and could draw up paper plans,
but in order to show the opponents at home that we weren't "intervening
in a civil war," our men couldn't go out to where the Greek forces were
in the field to show them how to carry the plans out. Under this new directive,
six words, Van Fleet could send out an American major to be with a Greek
general, and a lieutenant to be with a Greek major and a sergeant to be
with a Greek captain or lieutenant. At all levels, American advisors would
advise and train, go right into the field with them. Our men didn't have
any arms except side arms to defend themselves if they were attacked.
They didn't engage in combat, we had only, as I recall, a few hundred
advisers there, but they were down at the grassroots. We didn't do that
in China. I begged General Marshall later to let our advisers do
the same thing there. He wouldn't.
I talked to General Lucas who was in charge of our military aid mission
in Nanking that same fall, 1947. (I went on from Europe to Asia.) General
Lucas said, "I wish I could show you my directive. Here I have a staff
of a thousand, and people think we're really committed to helping
the Government of China against the Communist rebellion; but we are not
permitted to do
[43]
anything important All we can do is draw up a new table of organization
for the Chinese forces. We're getting them to shift,"--as I recall--"from
the four-squad system to the three-squad system,"--as we had done in our
own forces. "We're also preparing paper plans on logistics. But every
one of my men is forbidden, from Washington, to go within fifty miles
of any front. So," he said, "the exercise I'm going through here is a
pretense. I'm not able to do anything effective."
I came home and tried in vain to get the Administration to change the
directive, to let General Lucas and the advisers, "advise and train at
all levels" as they had done so successfully in Greece, and as our advisors
did later in Korea. When they sent Van Fleet there he was authorized to
participate at all levels. The Korean forces made real headway.
President Truman obviously wasn't aware of that history, so he kept saying
"Well, we've done exactly the same thing in China as in Greece." But unfortunately
we hadn't.
But I want to go back to the main point in my notes. I said to the President,
"One: we should try to save Formosa first, in order to save most of the
true liberals in China, the American educated
[44]
and oriented Chinese." We had put fifty years of investment and training
in leadership into these men in our own universities. The best elements
in the Chinese Government had gone to Formosa, the worst elements had
sloughed off. Camp followers don't take on that kind of an austere task--the
saving of the Chinese civilization. Those in Formosa are the cream of
the crop and yet they're being regarded as if they are the same old camp
followers that in some places had been dominant on the mainland. The proof
of this is what the Chinese have done on Formosa. They've done the single
best job of development done by any newly independent country in the world.
No other country remotely approaches what these supposedly terribly inept
Chinese have done. They had six adjectives at the State Department to
describe Chiang's people--inept, incompetent, inefficient, undemocratic,
corrupt and reactionary. The State Department leftists just mouthed those
six adjectives and paid no more real attention to our ally, the Chinese
Government. But that didn't bow it out.
The best elements of China were in that government--and they are still
going strong.
I said to Mr. Truman, "Surely a second objective is to encourage other
peoples in Southeast Asia to resist
[45]
Communism. If we walk out on Formosa and recognize Communist China, other
people in Asia will say, "Why should we resist? Those who resist
Communism have trouble, strikes, sabotage, internal disorders, bombings--at
home; but if you go along with it, then apparently you get along all right."
And he interrupted me there to say, "[Jawaharlal] Nehru's going to recognize
them today."
And I said that I felt that was perhaps an illustration of the very point
that I'd been trying to make, namely that Nehru felt there was no use
of counting on us as Chiang Kai-shek had, because we were walking out
on Chiang.
Mr. Truman said, "Well, Nehru never did want to come along with us."
I said, "I thought that he had wanted to, but he wasn't sure of us."
He said, "No, I offered directly to help him. I can't understand him.
I think he just doesn't like white men." That's what Truman said to me.
I said, I thought that was not the major reason, although he might understandably
be suspicious of the West, India having gone through what it had at the
hands of Westerners. I said, "We can overcome much of this, not by promises
to him, or offers to him, but by what we do toward people like the Chinese
in places like
[46]
Formosa." I have in parentheses here in my notes that I couldn't quite
tell him the people of Asia simply didn't believe him on the basis
of their past experience with us. But this was the fact.
And here I have, "He interrupted again to ask, 'How many American soldiers
do you want to put on Formosa?'"
And I replied, "Not a one."
He said, "It would take ten divisions. I am not willing to do that."
I said, "Neither am I and never have been. It is to avoid the use of
U.S. soldiers later that I feel we have to give proper aid to the Chinese
now on the Greek pattern." Then he started again on his contention that
we had done it and I've got here, "He became intense, angry, explosive
about the rottenest government in China that ever existed. You can't help
people who won't even try to help themselves. They surrendered every bit
of aid we gave them. They went over to the Communists whole armies at
a time." And then I've got, "I tried to get a word in to say that these
defections came after and were partly the result of our
withdrawal of support rather than the cause of our withdrawal of
support." How could we expect them to fight if they saw that it was hopeless.
He said, "Why, we had supplied whole Chinese armies."
[47]
I demurred because I knew something of the facts on that. He said, "Why,
we gave between three and four billion dollars worth of supplies, more
than to Europe."
I said, "We couldn't have supplied whole Chinese armies of four million
people with rifles, because we had sent only two hundred and fifty thousand
rifles at that time and that wasn't enough for four million soldiers."
"Why," he said, "we sent over a million rifles." But he was wrong, we
didn't. We sent ultimately four hundred thousand rifles. In the end the
Communists got a lot of that American equipment--but a lot was from the
six hundred shiploads of munitions we sent to Vladivostok during the war,
from Portland and Vancouver and Seattle. They sailed right through the
Japanese islands, and Japan never interfered with a one of them because
she had all she could do fighting China and us without taking on Russia.
They were sent to Vladivostok supposedly to help the Russians against
Hitler, and later against Japan.
Well, none of this stuff got to Europe. The Russians were in the Far
East war only five days, and the Russians turned those shiploads of munitions
over to the Chinese Communists--more at one stroke than we had ever given
our ally Chiang Kai-shek in all those years. Mr. Truman hadn't
[48]
been brought up to date by his own State Department on what had happened.
He said, "We also sent machine guns, trucks, artillery, planes, military
vessels, sent enough from Guam to supply their whole army." He said, "But
half of their navy had gone over to the Communists." He said, "They surrendered
one whole ammunition dump with a hundred and sixty thousand rounds, without
firing a shot."
He brought up General [David Goodwin] Barr and his Report on China. There
were two military men we had out there--I'm interrupting myself--who took
that negative position on China. One was General [Joseph W.] Stilwell
and the other was General Barr. They had no confidence in the Chinese
Government, they said that it was hopeless. General Barr had said to us
in Congress that not one battle had been lost during the year 1948, the
preceding year, for lack of arms or supplies. Yes, by that time, 1948,
they had, as I recall, an average of seventeen cartridges per man. Now,
an army, if it's only got seventeen cartridges a soldier, is not likely
to be very brave. It has no reserves. It gives up.
HESS: Liable to be a little cautious, won't they?
JUDD: A little cautious. He told me he had talked a whole hour with Barr.
Yes, he talked to Barr, the guy who thought
[49]
we couldn't succeed. But apparently he hadn't talked to generals like
Wedemeyer and the eight admirals we had there beginning with [Harry E.]
Yarnell and the next one was [Thomas C.] Hart, who later served in the
Senate from Connecticut, and on down through Admirals Cooke, Kincaid,
Barbey, Spruance, Badger to [Arthur W.] Radford--eight commanders-in-chief
of the Pacific Fleet in succession, who all wholly favored making an honest
effort to give our Chinese ally a chance, and believed it would succeed.
But one, Brigadier General Barr, said it's hopeless, so they followed
the advice of Barr--a hangover from the John Stewart Service period. The
Amerasia papers just recently released make clear why China was lost.
I said then as I have said so many times, that no one could guarantee
that we would succeed if we really tried in China, as we tried in Greece,
but I could guarantee that we would fail if we didn't try. And we didn't
try. Therefore, we got the disaster, the shift in world balance of power
against us with which we are struggling now (1970) and will be struggling
for decades. We thought up all of the reasons why we couldn't win,
instead of finding men and persons who had the will to win.
When the President said, that the Chinese hadn't followed our advice,
I said, "Well, Mr. President, most
[50]
of the times they got into trouble were when they did follow our advice."
And I can give you half a dozen instances of that. We advised them to
enter into a cease-fire in 1945 with the Communists when they had overwhelmingly
the upper hand, the main body of Communists was surrounded. Four times
in 1946 alone when the Nationalists had the upper hand, our government
forced them to enter into a cease-fire. They took our advice--allowing
the Communists to escape the encirclement.
After the Japanese surrender Wedemeyer and Barbey, under MacArthur's
orders, promptly helped transport Chiang Kai-shek's best troops from South
China up to Tientsin and Peking to take the surrender of Japanese troops--and
on up toward Kalgan. The only land route by which the Communist forces
in Northwest China could get into Manchuria where the Russians had moved
in was through the Kalgan pass and a road going through Jehol and Chahar
provinces. The Nationalists were within a few miles of Kalgan when General
Marshall put pressure on the Generalissimo (early January 1946) to pull
back his forces "in order to show his good will." (Just like the cease-fires
and cease-bombing of North Vietnam we are urged to do now to "show our
good will, to make a conciliatory gesture.") Tragically Chiang followed
our advice, pulled back
[51]
his forces, allowing the Communists to get into Manchuria. That's where
the Chinese lost the war--that's where we lost the war!--in 1946.
The Russians gave them all those supplies that Japan had stored there
for its crack Kuantung Army. (Its crack army never was in combat against
us. Its Kuantung army was held in reserve in Manchuria because the Japanese
originally were prepared if necessary to retire from Japan to Manchuria
and fight on from there. The same way Churchill had said, "If we can't
hold in Britain, we'll retire to Canada, or to Australia and fight on."
And if the Japanese Emperor hadn't intervened to order surrender, the
Japanese army itself would have done that.) The Russians had those enormous
supplies in Manchuria, Chennault said, as I recall, "Enough to last an
army of a million men five years." The Russians gave all of that at one
stroke to the Chinese Communists, more than we ever gave Chiang from beginning
to end.
The Russians also turned over to the Communists most of the 600 shiploads
of American arms we had shipped to Vladivostok. Yet Truman was saying
the American arms the Communists were using had come from Chiang. And
our leftists used to say Chiang was the Communist supply sergeant?
It was also said the Chinese forces had no will to fight--but when General
Marshall went out
[52]
there, his main complaint was that they had too much will to fight; they
were ready to defeat and disarm the Communists. He intervened and forced
them not to fight. He broke the will of the Chinese forces in late
'45 and the beginning of '46.
Again, it was complained that "whole Chinese armies went over to the
Communists" which was true in 1948-49. Truman apparently didn't know about
the so-called "deactivation" program, another of Marshall's projects in
which the Chinese followed our advice. Like the good general that he was,
Marshall looked around and saw that Chiang had some three hundred divisions.
But some of them had only two thousand or five thousand men, they were
just skeletons. And it was indeed wasteful because under the old Chinese
system--Chiang didn't create that, it had been there for four thousand
years--the money for a division of ten thousand men goes to the general.
Well, it's advantageous to him if he has only eight thousand men because
then he pockets the pay for the other two thousand. Chiang couldn't interrupt
that practice of centuries in the midst of a war of survival. So, General
Marshall, as a good general and assuming that "peace" had now come, said
Chiang ought to cut this force down, he ought to "deactivate," as I recall,
first a hundred
[53]
and ten of these three hundred divisions, and later deactivate eighty
or ninety more, down to about a hundred divisions. They could be filled
up to full strength and be good divisions. Now, this was a good sound
move--if there were internal peace and security; but there wasn’t.
The Communists were expanding their forces, expanding from 60 to 300 the
counties they controlled, and being rearmed and trained by the Russians
in Manchuria.
What was the predictable effect of the "deactivation" program on the
Chinese forces? It demoralized them. Here were the officers and men of
some two hundred divisions suddenly thrown on the street. China didn't
have any Veterans Administration. It didn't have any terminal leave pay
program. It didn't have any bonus to give a soldier to help him get adjusted
to civilian life. What did those forces do, especially the officers? They
said, "Why, here we've fought under this Chiang Kai-shek eight years and
now what happens? An American general comes over and tells him to deactivate
us and we're thrown on the streets. What kind of a leader is that?" And
whole divisions went over en masse to the Communists. It wasn't that individual
soldiers surrendered in combat. At the end the Chinese armies went over
to the Communists without
[54]
combat. That's another of our policies where the Chinese did follow our
advice. The whole China story has never been told, it's absolutely incredible
and shameful. No wonder people don't like to bring it up.
Well, when the President said the Chinese had had no will to fight, I
told him a little about this, and I said that they had held out at Mukden
for three months when our advisers told me they couldn't last six weeks.
According to my notes here they held out at Mukden thirteen months although
I think that's a mistake, it must have been three. He said, "Well, there
was one division did some fighting."
I said, "Their troops have defeated some twenty thousand Communist veterans
on Kin men Island (that's Quemoy), with only two regiments of newly trained
troops," and he didn't answer on that. I said that both the civilian and
military leaders on Formosa now are mostly American-trained and have done
good jobs. I thought they merited our support because the stakes for us
are so high.
He said repeatedly, "I know what I'm talking about. No use you arguing
with me or me with you."
I said that I felt his conclusions were based on less than the whole
picture and I would like the
[55]
opportunity to give him portions of that picture that he may not have
been given. He said that he had tried everything and could see nothing
to be done, now he "had to get back to work." I said I thought there were
some things to be done and he said, "Write them and send them in." I said
I would, thanked him and wished him a Happy New Year, because this was
the 29th of December, 1949.
Well, what happened shortly thereafter? I happen to know that people
in our government had earlier suggested to the British that if they would
recognize Red China, that would make it easier for us to do it and overcome
the opposition of the anti-recognition people in our country because it
could be said, "Well, we've got to stand with our allies, the British."
The British, so I was told by a good British friend, suggested to Nehru,
"Why don't you recognize Red China first? That will seem natural for you
to do as an Asian. If you recognize them, then it will be easier for us.
We can say, "We British ought to go along with our Commonwealth nations."
That would then make it easier for us Americans to do the same. It was
all set up and India did give official recognition to the Peking regime
that same week, and Britain shortly thereafter. We were set to recognize
Red China too, as I recall, about the 10th of January of 1950, eleven
or twelve days after I talked to Mr. Truman. But lo and behold, in the
week after
[56]
I talked to him and the week before recognition was due, the Communists
invaded our legation quarter in Peking and looted it. They paid no attention
to the American flag or any of our rights. Harry Truman set down his Missouri-mule
foot and said, "Nuts (and a few other words), I won't recognize a bunch
of bandits." It was only the Communists' mistake at that point which prevented
their being recognized in 1950. The same week Mr. Truman issued a statement
in which he said no aid of any sort would be given to Formosa. And it
was a week or so later, about the 18th of January when [Dean] Acheson
made the speech in which he said our perimeter of defense ran from the
Aleutian Islands through Japan to the Philippines and Australia. He thereby
invited the Korean war because obviously Taiwan and Korea were outside
our "perimeter of defense." The Russians have maps, too. Apparently they
dug one out, looked at it, and said, "Oh, oh, the United States is not
going to defend Taiwan and Korea." And still some wondered why the attack
on South Korea came just as quickly as they could get it organized after
we told them that Korea wasn't going to be defended. Then we turned around
and sent our boys into Korea and got them slaughtered in resisting the
invasion we had invited, because in the end we didn't dare let Korea go
from the standpoint of our own security
[57]
and interests in that part of the world.
Then MacArthur was called upon to save us from a mess that we wouldn't
have been in if his own advice had been followed, because he had opposed
our pulling all our troops out of Korea. That was decided here in Washington.
Now, I said earlier, before we got off onto this detour, that I perhaps
had something to do with that Truman-MacArthur episode, I had talked to
General MacArthur in 1947 in Tokyo. I knew he saw the whole Pacific theater,
not just one skirmish here or there. So I sent a message to him after
the aggression against South Korea, to this effect, "Wouldn't it be advantageous,
now that you have been named by the United States and the U.N. as theater
commander, for you to take a look at all the elements in your theater.
You're charged also with the defense of Taiwan." (The President's own
declaration said the Seventh Fleet would see that this was done and the
Seventh Fleet was under MacArthur's charge.) "So I would suggest it might
be advantageous if you made an inspection trip to Taiwan."
Whether that was the reason or not, I don't know, but he went to Taiwan
and all hell broke loose against him here in Washington, although he was
merely discharging his responsibility to defend the area. I have reason
to believe from very high Chinese authorities, that his trip was what
saved
[58]
Quemoy and Matsu. We had previously urged the Chinese to withdraw from
the Tachen Islands which was their lookout, up close to Shanghai. From
it they could monitor everything that went into and came out of Shanghai.
But we had put pressure on them and again they followed our advice and
evacuated their troops. We also urged them to pull out of Quemoy and Matsu
and they were reluctantly preparing to follow our advice when MacArthur
went over, took a look and said to the Chinese (he didn't know about this
pressure from Washington), "You must hang on to the islands. If you're
going to defend Taiwan, Quemoy and the Matsus are your outposts. The first
thing every military outfit does when it camps at night is to set out
its sentinels. These islands are your sentinels. If they start anything
against Taiwan, they've got to do it from the mainland ports; with those
offshore islands, you're tipped off ahead of time."
So the Chinese government bucked up after MacArthur's suggestion, held
its own against us and wouldn't evacuate. So once more Chiang Kai-shek
got cussed and I'm sure MacArthur got cussed too--but thank God the Chinese
listened to MacArthur instead of to the State Department boys who were
still demanding that step by step we turn all of China over to the Communists.
So, maybe I'm responsible
[59]
unwittingly for some of the bitterness that existed toward MacArthur,
but it's undeniable that the pulling out of MacArthur from Korea--turn
it off a minute.
I think I saw another thing in my file. Yes. I put it in right after
Truman's inaugural address in...
HESS: '49?
JUDD: '49. He said,
We shall have as our partners, countries which, no longer solely concerned
with the problem of national survival, are now working to improve the
standards of living of all their people.
So I dictated this comment:
In his inaugural address President Truman stated clearly the necessity
of security if there is to be maximum economic improvement. He said
that only when countries are no longer "concerned with the problem of
national survival" will they be able to work as our partners "to improve
the standards of living of all their peoples." But apparently, his State
Department did not believe him, for it demanded of China impossible
internal reforms as the first prerequisite of our assistance, even at
a time when in some cases like China, Korea and the Philippines, their
very survival, as independent nations, was in mortal peril. Both reform
and security are necessary and each assists the other, but it is demonstrated
that when a nation is threatened by Communists, it must give first priority
to security because only if it remains free is there any hope for democratic
reforms. Once taken by communism there will be no more chance for democracy
than there is today in Poland or in Manchuria.
He didn't see the inconsistency, between, his "moving onto build an ever
stronger structure of
[60]
international order and justice," and "we shall have as our partners
countries which, no longer solely concerned with the problem of national
survival, are now working to improve the standard of living of all their
people." Yet Chiang was expected to correct all the internal corruption
and political deterioration, military deterioration, moral deterioration,
economic deterioration, which were the result of eight years of war and
invasion, if he was to get our help. It was like saying to the Chinese,
"You've got pneumonia. You get well and then we'll give you some
penicillin." But they couldn't get well without the penicillin. It's a
tragic, tragic story. I repeat, I don't know that we could have succeeded
if we had tried, but it's a misrepresentation to let the public think,
as most of it still does, that we did all we could, but that conditions
in China were so bad and the Chinese government was so uncooperative that
it just wasn't possible to succeed.
Some years ago I wrote a piece on "The Five Lies About China." I've got
copies, but I won't bother you with the whole of it. The first lie was
that we did everything we could, and of course, you can document the falsehood
of that all the way down the line. For example, we never gave them one
word of moral support in eight
[61]
years. Not one word, just vilification.
Second, that we gave them enormous aid. Of course, that wasn't true either.
State will tell you we sent two billion dollars worth of aid during the
war. Well, some seven hundred million dollars of that was the cost in
America of supplies which we had started to China under lend-lease. They
got as far as Assam at the India end of the Hump. Most never got to China.
Piles of that aid were in Assam at the end of the war. They were tying
up Marines to guard them, were deteriorating, so were taken out in barges
and dumped in the Indian Ocean. But that still is charged on the books
as seven hundred million dollars worth of aid to China.
Another was surplus supplies that cost us some six hundred million dollars
that we sold to China for about twenty-one cents on the dollar. That was
stuff we had piled up on Guam and about fifteen other islands for use
against Japan. A fourth of it was five hundred pound bombs that we had
stockpiled to use against Tokyo, etc. Then the Japanese caved in. Some
of the most sophisticated equipment we brought home. Most of the rest
we were just bulldozing over the cliffs into the ocean to get rid of it
so our boys could come home. The Chinese offered to buy it for salvage.
They couldn't use five hundred pound
[62]
bombs, but they would take them apart to get the chemicals and the metal.
(They save everything.) Only about 2 percent of the total amount, our
men estimated, was usable ammunition for the Chinese. So out of that some
six hundred million dollars, in lieu of nothing, we got something
like a hundred and sixty million dollars, as I recall. This wasn't a grant.
By selling it to the Chinese we were a hundred and sixty million dollars
better off than we would otherwise have been. This whole story would have
been like comic opera if it hadn't been so tragic. I'm sure Mr. Truman
didn't know those facts. Back in the early 40's I heard him say, "Walter
knows more about the Far East than anybody I've known." But after he got
to be President he never once consulted me.
HESS: Why?
JUDD: Well, I don't know except that doubtless people in the State Department
gave him the line that Judd's an old China hand, he's "emotional" about
Asia, he's a partisan of Chiang Kai-shek, he's an Asia-firster. These
are the standard smears, or labels, which are used as substitutes for
thought. I have never been consulted under any administration on policy
in Asia (except by Dulles). I've offered my advice repeatedly. I'm still
doing it. It isn't often taken.
[63]
Ike took it, repeatedly, but nobody else did. I suppose they resented
that I had so often been proved right and the others so often wrong. And
pride is the original sin.
HESS: What would your advice be right now?
JUDD: What would be my advice now?
HESS: Yes.
JUDD: As far as Vietnam's concerned, number one, I would make sure that
the door is always open to genuine negotiation. Assure them every week
that whenever they want really to negotiate an end to the war rather than
just engage in propaganda, the door is wide open.
Second, I would not talk so much about what we're not going to
do. I wouldn't tip off all our plans. In order to please American public
opinion we say we're going to take so many troops out of this place, or
so many troops out of that, and that tells the enemy where South Vietnam's
weak spots are and we thereby invite attacks there. It's just like a coach
going on television on Friday night and diagramming all the plays he plans
to use on Saturday so the fans can follow the plays more easily in the
game they now will lose because they've been diagramed for the opposing
team too. I was in
[64]
Vietnam recently, and they begged us not to make all these announcements.
But we've got to please Americans, to hell with the Vietnamese--and the
lives of our own soldiers.
A third suggestion is, I wish we wouldn't use the word "withdraw." I
sent a memorandum on this to the White House suggesting we not say we're
"withdrawing" our forces. One synonym of the word withdraw, if you look
it up, is retreat. The word withdraw is negative, it is interpreted to
mean we're giving up, or we're implying we made a mistake and we're trying
to get out of it. We don't need to use the word "withdraw." Why don't
we say, "We're succeeding so well that the Vietnamese are now able to
take over more of the fighting. Our men aren't so needed." We're reducing
our forces because of success; not withdrawing because of failure. Semantics
is important. In Asia the word withdraw indicates we are putting our tail
between our legs and running, while we ask the Vietnamese to be brave
and stand firm. We could safely withdraw faster if we didn't use the word
withdraw.
HESS: Do you think semantics is more important in Asia than it seems
to be in the United States?
JUDD: I don't think it's any more important; it's different.
[65]
I think it's a good deal more important everywhere than we have appreciated.
Now the next thing I would do in Vietnam, I would let South Vietnamese,
if they are going to do the fighting, make more of the decisions where
and how to fight--which means they'll organize trouble in North Vietnam.
Why not? A million of them came down from there. One reason we hated President
[Ngo Dinh] Diem and General [Nguyen Cao] Ky is that they wanted to make
trouble in the North, both of them came from there. General Ky frankly
says, "We know where the caves are; we know where the trails are;
we know where the hideouts are; we know the local people; we know the
local dialects. Why don't you let us go back to be in the North the equivalent
of the Viet Cong in the South--call us a "liberation force." (It would
be a genuine liberation force.) But no, we won't let them do that.
Mustn't provoke the enemy: He can sit behind the DMZ and be sure that
he's going to be safe there while he kills in the South.
Another thing to do would be to close that Haiphong port. It's just military
madness to allow that to be left open through which goes the stuff that's
used to kill our own boys.
[66]
And another thing to do would be to tell them privately at Paris--not
publicly, it's hard to back down under a public ultimatum--just tell them
privately, with a time limit, to cut out all the invective and negotiate
meaningfully to get a settlement of this conflict. We only insist on one
thing--that the South Vietnamese be given a chance--the right--to determine
their own destiny. On anything else, we'll negotiate. And I would tell
them that if they don't do that, we would do several things. I would notify
them we're going to start attacking certain strategic targets in North
Vietnam, the most important ones, not the minor ones. Tell them, "Please
get your people away from those targets, we're going to have to destroy
them. We don't want to kill North Vietnamese, but we've got to reduce
your capacity to kill South Vietnamese and Americans." We've done that
in previous wars. When we were going into Italy, the Nazis holed up in
Monte Cassino, a monastery up on top of a small mountain, counting on
our respect for religious places to keep us from attacking it. But it
was a place where they could murder our lines of supply coming up from
the beachheads. So, finally, we dropped leaflets from planes and we broadcast,
"All you nuns and priests and civilians, get out of there if you can,
because this
[67]
is a military target and we're going to have to destroy it." And we attacked
it. Nobody here at home screamed that we were barbarians. It was a military
target. But out in Vietnam, we mustn't attack such military targets because
there might be a few civilians on the edge and they'd get hurt. There's
never been a war in history in which civilians weren't killed. If we're
not prepared to do that, then for God's sake don't start the action. I'm
a surgeon by profession. I have never been able to operate without losing
some blood and sacrificing some innocent tissue, perfectly healthy tissue.
We mutilate and leave a scar. If we are not prepared to do that, for goodness
sake don't start operating.
I was astonished when President Johnson said over the television that
we didn't do anything of this sort against North Vietnam, because we weren't
sure but that North Vietnam had some agreement with the Russians or Chinese
that would bring them into the war. Well, why did he send one soldier
to fight there (or Kennedy ahead of him), if he wasn't prepared to take
that risk? Why start at all if we are to say, in effect, "Now we're going
to do this if it's easy; but of course, if it's hard, we're not going
to go through with it." Every time I operate, I run the risk of an infection,
[68]
a hemorrhage, an embolus, a cardiac arrest--and it happens in a certain
number of cases. I operate because there's a greater danger from the disease
if I don't operate. There's danger if we do the things I suggest, but
it's a greater danger to allow the struggle to drag on and our country
become more and more torn apart. We're divided at home and losing our
friends and supporters around the world.
And there's another thing we should do--this is a big one: Go to work
on their food supply. In every previous war food has been a major and
legitimate target. Some eighty-five percent of North Vietnam's rice is
grown in the Red River delta. It's about a hundred miles on each side.
The Red River meanders down through it, about ten to twenty feet above
the level of the land held in by dikes. All we have to do is tell them,
privately, to negotiate meaningfully or else we're going to start breaking
those dikes one here and one there, not all at once. Don't drown the people,
just cut down their food supply. Oh, that's barbarous I'm told. Well,
if that's so, then Abraham Lincoln was a barbarian because he certainly
sent [General Philip] Sheridan down through the Shenandoah Valley to burn
the crops and [General William T.] Sherman down
[69]
through the South to destroy the food supply. And we put a land and sea
blockade on Germany and a sea and air blockade on Japan which were cruel
but crippled the enemy's capacity to fight. And it was Ike's attack upon
the North Korean food supply, the bombing of a couple of irrigation dams
in North Korea, that ended the fighting in Korea. That's a way to help
end the war. There are risks if you do that, but are there no risks in
just drifting along as we are doing, while the other side gets stronger
and our side weaker and with our allies falling apart, with less and less
confidence in us?
Mr. Truman made a decision not to win the war in Korea when we were in
the fourth quarter and finally in the lead. He decided not to go ahead,
but pulled out our star quarterback, MacArthur. This was one of the greatest
mistakes in history and he won't be able to escape responsibility for
it, even as his original going into Korea was one of the great decisions
of history for which it will give him full credit. But an even greater
and more crucial decision was his proposal of the Greek-Turkey program
in 1947. Without that Europe would have been lost, too. And if we had
had a program like that in China, I don't think we'd have lost China--and
very possibly the rest of Asia. But we didn't have such a program for
Asia, in spite of his protests to the contrary. I can
[70]
document it. In China we told them that they had to take the Communists
in. In contrast, in Greece and the rest of Europe we told them they had
to keep the Communists out of the government if they wanted our aid.
In Italy for example, in 1947 when the big election was coming up, it
looked as if the Communists would win it. We, our government, urged every
Italian in this country to write to his folks in Italy and say, "Vote
against the Communists, vote for the Christian Democrat, [Alcide] de Gasperi,
and we'll help you with big grants to get your shattered economy going.
Don't vote for the Communists, because then we can't help you." They voted
for de Gasperi and against the Communists, and we poured the aid in. If
we had done that in China, I don't know that we would have succeeded,
but we had a good chance.
If you look up the preamble of the "White Paper," Mr. Acheson has one
of those very skillful lawyer's statements. Something like: "Nothing we
did not do contributed to its (China's) loss. Nothing we could have done
would have prevented its loss." But he doesn't mention another one, He
doesn't say that nothing we did contributed to its loss.
Oh,boy, the pressures we put upon Chiang to accept the Communists into
his government, to
[71]
accept cease-fires, not to block their escaping into Manchuria, etc.
There were four main things we did that contributed decisively to the
loss of China. First was the betrayal by Roosevelt on Manchuria. After
promising at Cairo that Manchuria would go back to "its rightful owners,
the Chinese," to use his words, some twenty days later in Iran he gave
control of Manchuria to the Russians. This discredited Chiang and all
but destroyed him at home. He had fought Japan for eight years to keep
Manchuria. If it weren't for China's need to keep Manchuria, he wouldn't
have had a war with Japan. After fighting all those years, he found his
trusted ally had broken its word. Without Manchuria and its resources
he knew it would be practically impossible to really develop in China
the strength and stability he wanted and we urged.
The second was the four cease-fires Marshall coerced Chiang into accepting
in 1946--whenever he had the upper hand: They practically destroyed the
morale of his armies. Were they supposed to fight or not?
The third was the embargo that Marshall put on thirty caliber ammunition
to Chiang. We had supplied some 400,000 old Enfield and Springfield rifles--they
weren't worn out, but they were obsolete. We didn't need them now
[72]
because we had the Garand, a better rifle. So we sent them over to Chiang.
But that meant he had to get ammunition for them from us. His own rifles
were 7.92 caliber, I think it was, the German caliber. (Chiang had tried
to get military help from us in the '30s. We wouldn't give it, so he got
General Von Falkenhausen from Germany to come out to help train his troops,
build up his arsenals, etc. Naturally he used the German caliber.) And
so here were Chiang's best troops, the crack thirty-three divisions that
Stilwell and Wedemeyer had trained--without any ammunition for their 30-caliber
rifles. Marshall put on an embargo for eight crucial months,
from the summer of '46 up until about May of 1947. Chiang's best troops
were disarmed.
The fourth was the "deactivation" of about 200 divisions. No wonder Acheson
did not write, "Nothing we did contributed to Chiang's defeat." Those
four actions contributed decisively to the defeat. Mr. Acheson has now
changed his views completely about Asia. He says that saving Vietnam now
(as was China then) is just as essential to saving Asia as saving Greece
and Turkey was to Europe. If you let China and Vietnam go, it is almost
impossible to keep the rest of Asia from going, and I include Japan.
[73]
HESS: Do you think that during the period of the Korean war if Chiang
had invaded the mainland that the invasion would have been successful?
JUDD: I don't know about that but if the Chinese Communists had had some
fear that he might, I'm sure they wouldn't have entered the Korean war.
It was the fact that they knew they were secure at home which opened
the door to Korea for them. They knew because we assured them, directly
and indirectly, that they didn't have anything to fear, we wouldn't let
Chiang move against them. Chiang could at least have tied them down at
home, that's the point. If we were considering only our own boys in Korea,
he could have made the Chinese Reds hesitate. Neither Russia or China
has risked war for itself. Of course, one major reason why the Chinese
Communists have not intervened in Vietnam is that their allies and supporters
in this country have done such a good job of weakening our effort and
dividing us at home that they haven't needed to intervene. And a second
reason is that the Chinese Reds have on their flank, Taiwan. They've got
a half to three quarters of a million of their best troops tied up on
the mainland defending against Taiwan. They can't go away to fight against
us in Vietnam.
[74]
Chiang Kai-shek's just being there is a powerful deterrent to Red China's
intervening in the Vietnam war because the lines of communication in China,
except for the Yangtze River, are almost entirely north and south and
they are easily cut able from the bases that we have helped the Chinese
build on Taiwan. Taiwan is an unsinkable aircraft carrier, right there
on the enemy's front door or flank--a tremendous asset, not a liability,
to us.
HESS: If the advice of the State Department to President Truman has been
in error, has been a mistake, who would you say in the State Department
were responsible, or primarily responsible?
JUDD. Well, it was what was openly called in Washington in '43, '44 and
'45 the Red Cell in the State Department--The Far East Division, led by
the Four Johns as they called them. John Carter Vincent was the Assistant
Secretary in charge and under him were John Stewart Service, John Payton
Davies, and John Emmerson--the Four Johns. As they used to say in China,
with those Americans on their side at home, the Communists didn't need
any other allies to win out there. Now I don't suggest that any of them
were Communists, although there's no denying that John Stewart Service
was instrumental in getting some sixteen hundred secret documents--and
some
[75]
of them top secret, "for eyes only"--into the hands of Philip Jaffe,
who it was testified under oath, was a Russian agent.
I knew Philip Jaffe. When I came home from China in 1938 to try to get
us to stop building up Japan's military by selling her scrap iron and
oil, the first supporters I got were from certain Communist elements--one
of them was Philip Jaffe of Amerasia. Another was Robert Norton, head
of something calling itself American Friends of the Chinese people. They
just flocked around to arrange meetings for me. I was great. But it didn't
take me long to discover--I only went to two of their meetings--that they
weren't really interested in the Chinese people. They were interested
in helping China tie down Japan so Japan couldn't make trouble for Russia:
They were supporting my efforts to stop building up Japan in order that
Russia, confronted with Hitler on its west, wouldn't have to confront
a hostile and strong Japan on its east. Communists know how to play their
cards and they are without scruples. About Philip Jaffe there wasn't any
argument. As soon as I found out his Communist connections, I continued
my crusade against munitions for Japan, but not for the reasons motivating
him.
[76]
And yet here was John Stewart Service and others in the Department associating
intimately with fellows like Jaffe. You know of those secret documents
he leaked to Amerasia. I put some of them in the Congressional Record
away back in 1949 after the White Paper came out. (There are a lot of
patriots in the Department, believe me. And sometimes they leak stuff
out, too, as do those who seem to be not on our side.) I wasn't willing
to make them public earlier, because I was afraid that they might provide
keys to our codes. But when the White Paper came out and it had in it
quotations from those statements, then I had no reluctance because if
a code could be broken by their publication, it had already been broken.
They published in the White Paper only those portions of the documents
that were innocuous and left out other passages which were devastating
to ourselves. I put them in the Record in the summer and fall of 1949
and made speeches in the Congress about them. Nobody would pay attention.
The news media apparently adopted the Commie line that Judd was just emotional
about Asia so don't report what he says, just downgrade it, bury it. I
didn't mind except that it was bad for my country. It would have been
a lot better for our country if they had paid more attention to the advice
of people who had
[77]
been out there, including almost all missionaries. They generally took
the same position as I because they were there during that period, they
were close to it, they knew the score.
Well, I had one other statement--let me look a minute--regarding Mr.
Truman. Oh yes. Right after Korea started, I called him in July of 1950
and I made some recommendations which he didn't pay any attention to.
I said, number one "Why don't you recall into the State Department [Joseph]
Grew and [Stanley K.] Hornbeck and [Joseph William] Ballantine?" Here
were three men who were right. Those in the Red Cell had boasted,
"Well, at least we got rid of Grew and Hornbeck and Ballantine." I said
to the President, "Now these men have been right, pull back in the men
who have been right, Mr. President, and transfer out of the department
those associated with the past errors. They will sabotage your new policies."
This was when he came out after the Korean invasion, and said we were
going to change our positions re Asia. "They will sabotage your new policies
which expose the wrongs of their previous policies."
Don't expect men to work hard to prove that they've been wrong in the
past. If my doctor makes a mistake on me and on my father and my mother
and my wife and
[78]
my children, and they all die, I don't call him a Communist, I just want
a better doctor. I said, "Send these top men who were right to Formosa,
Philippines, Indochina, as you sent, Mr. President, [Henry Francis] Grady
to Greece and Iran, and Roosevelt sent Wedemeyer to China after Stilwell
had failed." I also said, "Put MacArthur in genuine charge in the Far
East. He's been right all along."
I recalled the fact that State had almost wrecked MacArthur in 1945.
As soon as the Japanese surrendered, the State Department sent a group
into Japan led by a fellow named George Acheson (Alger Hiss was one of
them and three or four others). They went out there really to take charge
of MacArthur. And if MacArthur hadn't had such stature as to be able to
defy them, he would have been taken over.
The first thing they demanded--the very first day after the surrender--was
that they go in person to the prisons where the Japanese had put their
Communist prisoners. All those "political prisoners" must be let out and
be rehabilitated, the Communists, whom the Japanese had thrown in jail.
Undoubtedly they wanted to have Japan go Communist too.
MacArthur was strong enough to check their efforts--but they never gave
up on him.
[79]
I suggested that the President withdraw the insulting "declaration of
war" on the Chinese government then on Taiwan. That refers to a sentence
in the major statement he put out two days after the attack on Korea began
on the 25th of June, 1950. In it he said the Seventh Fleet would be put
in the Formosa Straits to ensure that Communist China not attack Taiwan.
He asked that Chiang refrain from taking action against the mainland.
Then he added, "The 7th Fleet will see that this is done." It was an announcement
to the world that Chiang must do as we say, or we would make war on him.
There was no slightest reason to believe that he would attack. It was
a wholly needless insult. I said, "Withdraw that declaration of war against
our ally. It is bad for Free China, but it's bad for us, too. It denies
our own talk about not returning to the 'rule of force.' We've denounced
the Communist use of force in this situation. Why not end the effort to
discredit Chiang? On the record, Chiang is almost the only leader in the
world who is not discredited today."
The President was discredited himself because just six months before
he had announced a policy of not doing anything
[80]
about China, now that the Communists were in power. Now he had to reverse
himself. I added, "It wouldn't hurt for us to be gracious and noble, not
petty and mean, in this change of policy by which we are joining Chiang.
(We had in fact come to his position, that the Communists had to be stopped
in Asia.) "For us to pretend otherwise fools no one but ourselves and
it discredits us, not him." I said, "We ask Russia to do so and
so; we direct Chiang."
The Oriental understands this as deliberately humiliating. It downgrades
him, destroys him with his own people. If you go back to one of John Stewart
Service's pieces that he wrote to Stilwell in October 1944--one I put
into the Congressional Record--he urged Stilwell to ask the Department
in Washington, the President, really, who at that time was Roosevelt,
to send our Ambassador to China, Pat [Patrick J.] Hurley, up to the Communist
headquarters in Yenan. Then Service added that such a visit "would have
significance that no Chinese would miss--least of all the Generalissimo."
Service had been brought up out there, he was the son of a YMCA secretary
in China, he knew the language and customs and so on. He knew that if
Washington sent Hurley up to Yenan to see Chiang's enemy, Mao, Chiang
would be finished with his own people.
[81]
It would tell them we were not going to support Chiang as an ally but
were going to treat him and Mao, his enemy, on a basis of equality.
Then we did the same sort of thing later. When the Communist forces,
rebuilt in Manchuria, were coming from the North and threatening Nanking,
the Chinese government pulled out of Nanking and took refuge in Canton.
All of the embassies in Nanking, including the Russian Embassy, as I recall,
went with the Chinese government to which they were accredited. But. John
Leighton Stuart, our Ambassador, was ordered from Washington to keep our
embassy in Nanking where he welcomed the Communists coming in. Then some
wondered why Chiang went down. The Chinese weren't fools. If we weren't
going to stand by him, he couldn't possibly make it. So why should they?
Service knew all this. That was why he said, "Nobody in China, least
of all the Generalissimo, will fail to understand this action."
I said to President Truman, "An ultimatum or a demand is the poorest
way to get desired results in Asia. These are the same tactics that didn't
work when used by Stilwell and Marshall." They demanded--(the Generalissimo's
mistake was that he yielded in the beginning to Marshall).
Stilwell demanded--and was refused. I was over there when he was withdrawn.
I had dinner
[82]
with him the last night and I went to his plane to see him off the next
morning. The last thing he said was, "God help my successor." But his
successor, Wedemeyer, succeeded brilliantly right where Stilwell had failed.
Instead of telling the Generalissimo what he had to do, Wedemeyer
said to the Generalissimo, "We're in a war together, we're allies, we
need each other. How can we work most effectively together? How can I
be most useful to you in what you must do to defend your country,
for to defend your country helps to defend my country." And within three
weeks, by approaching him on the basis of working with him instead
of ordering him, Wedemeyer had been given by the Generalissimo all the
powers, and more, that Stilwell had demanded and been refused.
There it was right before our eyes. I said, "Please stop, Mr. President,
these vindictive, these dictatorial attitudes and work with the Chinese
as Wedemeyer had done--and succeeded, and as Stilwell and Marshall hadn't,
and failed.
I said, "Our worst results have followed our unilateral acts in the past.
In Cairo we promised Manchuria to China and then went to Tehran and Yalta
and secretly gave control of it to the
[83]
Soviet Union. And Marshall's unilateral ultimatum to Chiang, 'Unite with
the Communists or else,' was a disaster to him and to us. If we give some
deserved recognition to the Chinese government as a loyal ally, there's
every chance Chiang will cooperate fully. We can't force him to under
pressure. If he doesn't obey us, we denounce him here. If he does obey
us, he's destroyed at home. So, please don't stick the knife in him merely
to satisfy the hatred of some Americans. Let's concentrate on winning
the ball game, not on killing a player on our own side whom we don't like.
Greatness will go much further than attempted coercion. It's rather comical
to witness us catching the train of our own interests in the last half
minute and immediately assuming charge and ordering off the train those
who have been manning it single-handedly for years. Force against allies
doesn't ,get us anything anywhere; it greatly weakens our own case and
our prospects for success," Then I added,
"If drunk with sight of power
We loose wild tongues that have not Thee in awe;
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
And lesser breeds without the law,
Lord God of hosts be with us yet;
Lest we forget, lest we forget."
HESS: What did he say?
[84]
JUDD: He just listened to me. He said, "Walter, you and I have talked
about this many times and we aren't going to have any argument." He just
listened to me and didn't say a thing.
HESS: One question about B2H2, that resolution was not passed, but one
by Senator [Tom] Connally was finally passed, I believe on November 5,
1943. Is that correct?
JUDD: Yes, that's right. But it was the essence of B2H2. It was modified
somewhat and then came out as a committee resolution under the name of
the Chairman, Senator Connally.
Now you go ahead with questions and we'll wind up this long dissertation.
HESS: That's all right.
JUDD: You asked me that question of what we should do now in Vietnam
or I wouldn't have given you all that.
HESS: That's good. That's very good.
Where were you the day that you heard of President Roosevelt's death?
JUDD: I was in my office on Capitol Hill, room 1516 in the New House
Office Building, and a Congressman from across
[85]
the hall came into my office and said, "Have you heard the news?"
And I said, "No, what?"
He said, "Roosevelt just died down at Warm Springs." It seems to me it
was Bob Poage of Texas. We stood there and talked a minute--the immediate
effect was shock, what in the world is going to happen now, and so on.
HESS: What kind of a President did you think that Mr. Truman would make?
JUDD: Well, frankly, I was relieved, because Mr. Roosevelt's health had
failed to a point where he had lost his shirt at Yalta. I have reason
to believe that he knew when he came from Yalta, he'd been taken. I once
talked to Mr. [Avere11[ Harriman about this, one of only a few people
now living who know what happened there. I didn't blame Mr. Roosevelt
in a sense (I think I made this statement in Congress). At Yalta, he saw
the world collapsing that he had built up based on cooperation with the
Soviet Union. (They cooperated only as long as they had to have our help
against Hitler. Now they were already tearing us down.) He saw his house
of cards falling apart and in desperation he was trying to shore it up
at Yalta. But he knew by the time he got home
[86]
that he had made a giant mistake. In his last public speech, it was before
the Congress, his last major public appearance, about the first of March,
he was so sick he couldn't stand up, sat in his wheelchair, tried to joke
about that. He had make-up on his face and forehead to overcome the ghastliness
of his color. I sat there and noted this as a physician. He said something
like, "I don't like the agreement I entered into with respect to Poland."
(You can look up the exact words. You see he had also sold out Poland
in a way, given half of Poland to the Soviet Union and then part of Germany
to Poland.). "But," he said, "I got assurance that Poland will be strong,
independent and prosperous." He put down his manuscript and ad libbed,
"I want to repeat, that Poland will be strong, independent and prosperous.
And I felt that in order to get the Soviet Union to cooperate with us
after the war, it was justifiable to make this sacrifice inasmuch as in
return Poland will be strong, independent and prosperous."
Well, he got the same sort of promise at Yalta regarding Rumania. There
would be democratic elections there. But before he got home [Andrei] Vyshinski
had gone into Rumania and cancelled the "democratic" elections.
[87]
Poland's independence was a dead duck too. There are only a few people
who know the whole story, they ought to tell it. Who was the fellow, Governor
of New Hampshire, who committed suicide when he was Ambassador to Britain?
He was one of the men who knew we had lost.
HESS: [John] Winant.
JUDD: Winant, yes. Harry Hopkins was another, and he's dead. Probably
Alger Hiss knows, but you can't trust him for the truth. Harriman knows.
I talked to Harriman about it one time. I said, "Mr. Harriman, you owe
it to Mr. Roosevelt to tell the whole story because otherwise he's going
to be condemned in history. You know the circumstances under which he
made these concessions which he hinted at in his last speech, but which
he didn't spell out. He was desperately ill and he was trying to hold
things together. Now, he is likely to go down in history as just a double-crosser,
if you don't tell it." Well, Harriman never has. I wish he would.
HESS: Did he tell you?
JUDD: Oh, no, he didn't tell me. I knew some of it from other sources.
I tried to get George Kennan to talk about it one time and this is in
a transcript I have.
[88]
It never was published, it was in an off-the-record committee meeting,
but there's a stenographic report of it. I said, "Mr. Kennan, did you
think Russia would cooperate with us after the war to build a decent peace?"
He said, "No, sir, I did not."
I said, "Well, you were our number one expert on Russia. You had been
set aside back in 1933 by Bill [William Christian] Bullitt to give your
full time and attention to learning the Russian language and becoming
our number one Soviet expert. Now, you were at Yalta, you were number
two in our embassy there, is it conceivable that they paid no attention
to your advice, and though you thought the Russians wouldn't cooperate,
we went ahead and gambled everything on the assumption that they would
cooperate?"
He said, "Well, frankly while I was number two in our embassy I didn't
have anything to do with any of the political discussions at Yalta." He
said he was kept preoccupied in arranging protocol at the various dinners,
who sits where, and making sure the showers operated in the place to which
they were going for a holiday down on the Black Sea coast. He said he
was so busy with all the details which were his responsibility at the
conference, the arrangements, that he did not
[89]
participate in any of the discussions of the conference.
Now, that's another one I'm going to release some day. Because it ought
to be released. It's incredible; here's our number one expert--and deathly
sick Mr. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins sit there and lose the ball game
because they don't pay attention to the expert. They were so anxious to
succeed. It was like in Vietnam now, we're so eager to get peace, the
adversaries see we want it so badly that they just wait until America
will get them more.
As I once heard one of my daughters say to her younger sister, If you
want that boy, don't chase him so." Well, that's better sense than we
have so often used in our negotiations in life and death matters. We're
always trying to show how sincerely we want peace and that they don't
need to be afraid of us. But they don't do what they do because they fear
or distrust us, they do it because they want to win. That's not considered
reprehensible. Deception is a virtue with them the same as it is a virtue
for a good quarterback. The objective in football is not to improve his
team's relations with the other team. The objective is to win the ball
game and if he can do it
[90]
by deception and fooling the other team, that's what he is supposed to
do. He gets a raise in pay because he's so good at deception.
HESS: Did you have any other relationships with Mr. Truman while he was
President that we haven't discussed?
JUDD: No, I think not. I have been invited to the White House under every
other President. But I never was invited while Truman was there.
HESS: Were you surprised by his victory in 1948?
JUDD: Yes. But I wasn't as surprised as most other people were, because
I was out in the hustings and I knew things were not good. The Republicans
were just coasting. Dewey came to Minneapolis-St. Paul and he made a speech
before a big crowd. He just engaged in platitudes and I groaned. He thought
he had it won, you see; that all he needed to do was to "keep his nose
clean" and he wouldn't lose. Well, in the end when you're up against a
tough fighter like Truman, the guy who is on the offensive always has
the advantage. The same in the world today. The Communists are on the
offensive, we're on the defensive. The advantage is with them. Just like
the activist youth in
[91]
our colleges today, they’re on the offensive; the students who are there
to get an education, they just want to be left alone and do their studies,
and the advantage is with the radicals. They're on the offensive always.
I was surprised indeed, that my party put on such a bad campaign. I think
it was a calamity in certain respects. I think Dewey would have been a
great President. Well, I won’t say great, but a good President.
Mr. Truman was a man of complete integrity and he had courage, but he
had some grave limitations. He didn't have the education or the grasp
of things that others have had, this was his shortcoming. But of the two,
I’d rather have integrity and courage--you can hire people to give
you information--than to have people like some I could name who have great
scholarly ability, but who fold when the chips are down. We've had some
of each kind.
HESS: What would you rate as Mr. Truman's major accomplishments?
JUDD: Oh, well I...
HESS: Or singular, if you think there was one outstanding major accomplishment.
JUDD: I think probably his greatest achievement, or greatest accomplishment
was sponsorship of the Greek-Turkey program
[92]
in the spring of 1947. This took great courage. He was greatly opposed
by the whole liberal group. Mr. [Walter] Lippmann and the whole claque.
They said it was a terrible thing to do, these were such unworthy governments.
[The same argument now in Vietnam, [General] Nguyen Van Thieu is "corrupt"
or something or other, or the government isn't efficient, we shouldn't
associate with them. But they are on our side.]
The Democrats have associated with a few political machines here which
were not the most savory in the world, but they couldn't get elected without
them. Mr. Roosvelt won because of his skill in keeping together a coalition
of four incompatibles. He was a genius. There were the old-fashioned Democrats,
the Jeffersonian Democrats, the Byrds of Virginia, and so on. Then there
were the racists, the [Theodore] Bilbos, FDR never called them names,
he couldn't win without them. Then there were the city machines. There
was never any worse bosses than old Jim [James M.] Curley and [John Francis]
Fitzgerald in Boston, and Kelly-Nash in Chicago and Tammany Hall. He never
denounced them, he couldn't win without them. Then there were the liberals,
the New Dealers--but they couldn't win on their own. Here were four strange
bedfellows. It is comical to see some of the liberals who depend for their
being in power on
[93]
corrupt machines in America, get so persnickety about associating with
corrupt machines over there, even though they are essential to defeat
of our mortal enemy. I think it is a little too fastidious and hypocritical
to be so concerned about corruption in Vietnam, but so tolerant--we'll
call it that--of it here when it is to one's own political advantage.
HESS: What would you see as the major failure of the Truman administration?
JUDD: I think the major failure was the failure to go ahead and win in
Korea, the deliberate decision not to win, and to pull out MacArthur in
part as a result of that decision. It was just when the tide was being
turned and MacArthur kept trying to push ahead, that he was pulled out.
MacArthur told me one time--in 1952--"I knew the State Department was
against me, they had fought me ever since 1945, but the White House and
the Pentagon had supported me one hundred percent." He said, "If they
had given me one hint that they were dissatisfied, they would have had
my resignation in 30 seconds, but the President never gave me one indication
that he was at all dissatisfied. The Joint Chiefs raised questions about
this or that and we
[94]
gave our answers, but never had they come back in disapproval. And then
the first thing I knew was when Jean [Mrs. MacArthur] came in a little
late to lunch and said, 'I just heard over the radio that you've been
relieved."' That's how he got the notice. That was one of the most insulting
and discourteous things imaginable, not to call a man in or send word
to him ahead of time so he could resign or have a little preparation.
Instead Truman hit him in the back. It was MacArthur's, not Truman's,
stature that grew. He conducted himself with the greatest dignity and
propriety under the most terrible provocation.
[John Foster] Dulles told a group of us in Minnesota about this. He was
a Republican and he was working with the Democratic State Department on
the Japanese Peace Treaty. He said, "They asked me to fly at once to Japan
to steady things. They didn't know what might happen in Japan. They wanted
me to say in Japan, 'MacArthur's out, but America's policy toward Japan
isn't going to change!'" Because MacArthur had a unique position in Japan,
kind of second-only-to-the-Emperor, they didn't know here but what maybe
things would fall apart there. Dulles said, "On the way out, my plane
passed his in the air as he returned. We talked back and forth," not by
telephone then,
[95]
but by Morse code, "and there was not one word of bitterness from the
General. I asked him for advice and he gave me concrete suggestions as
to what it would be most useful for me to do and say when I got to Tokyo.
His whole concern was for the success of his mission out there." Dulles
said, "I never had greater admiration for a man. Under such provocation,
he still uttered not a word of personal bitterness; he considered only
the cause of his country." He added, "As long as America can produce men
of that stature and caliber it will be safe."
This was Mr. Truman's greatest mistake, that he finally went along with
the appeasers in his own government, particularly in the State Department.
HESS: There is a school of thought that thinks that General MacArthur
was acting through political motives and that he was planning on running
for President and was building a case for himself in his dispute with
President Truman.
JUDD: That isn't true. I'm just as sure that isn't true as anything I
know about, because I talked to him about it several times. He didn't
have a dispute with Truman. He thought he was doing what Truman himself
wanted. He was basically a soldier. Ike was another soldier who did
[96]
not seek the Presidency. I know because I know how hard a time
we had to persuade him to run. And MacArthur didn't seek it at that time.
If they were called upon to do a job that was for their country, they
would do it. MacArthur had all the honors anyone could want or imagine.
He was worried about our country and if he had come home and found out
that people felt about him as they did about Ike, that he ought to run
for it, he would have done so. But the notion that he was engaging in
intrigue and so on, which Truman probably believed, I just say categorically
it wasn't so.
HESS: What do you think Mr. Truman's place in history will be? One or
two hundred years from now, how will he be regarded by historians and
the general public?
JUDD: Well, I think he will be given credit for his strengths--and he'll
probably have to accept--he can't avoid--responsibility for the mistakes,
and the great one was that just when we, as I say, were leading in the
fourth quarter of the game in Asia, he pulled back. This was a disaster.
This led to the Vietnam war, and it's going to lead to more and more troubles.
We haven't begun to see the end of the troubles in Asia in my opinion.
[97]
HESS: One last question: What should be our position at the present day,
in regard to China? How can we try to resolve this trouble?
JUDD: Well, we've got abut three main possibilities. We can go to war
with Communist China. Or we can appease her and thereby make her stronger
and more dangerous and more truculent. Or we can patiently keep her contained
until her own failures at home and abroad compel her to change her international
attitude and behavior to that of reasonably civilized nations. By the
way, our word kowtow comes from two Chinese words: "kow" meaning to bow
the head, "tou," to the earth. When we, in our eagerness to get along
with them, move toward their terms and gradually back away from our own
positions, Mao Tse-tung having seen that his belligerence and stubborn
defiance succeed, will only become more belligerent and more defiant.
Why should he abandon a tough policy which is getting success and adopt
a truly conciliatory policy? We've had the idea that if we treat our friends
as if they were our enemies, let the friends down, then our enemies having
seen how we treat our friends will rush over to become our friends: No,
they'll be all the more hostile enemies.
[98]
I've asked three questions when the line is advanced that we ought to
be more conciliatory, make more unilateral concessions. One; what will
be the effect upon Red China itself? Why, it'll make it more belligerent,
of course.
Four months ago out in Asia, a very wise Asian said to me, "You Americans
spend billions of dollars to go to the moon. Mao Tse-tung just sits there,
and the moon (meaning us) comes to him." All a Chinese emperor generally
demanded of China's satellites during the centuries was that they send
him tribute, maintain order at home, and once a year the top man come
and bow down on his hands and knees before the emperor. So, when we "bow
down" before Mao, we make him stronger and ourselves weaker.
Second question; what will be the effect upon our allies out in Asia?
Well, if we, the strong accept Red China, can the weak countries resist?
The ball game will soon be over and they will have won it. That's why
every Communist in the world has worked day and night for years to get
diplomatic recognition of Red China. Would they be working so hard for
that if they thought it would not be good for them? There's the
proof of the folly of appeasement.
And the third question is; what would it do to the UN
[99]
to admit Red China as she is now? Well, it would just weaken the UN.
You've already got some in it trying to block it from working effectively
and you'd have one more. I don't want to drag the UN down to the level
of the gangsters. I can see no possible benefits from trying to build
bridges to China until she changes her behavior to warrant such an effort.
It is said we're stubbornly, arbitrarily keeping Red China out of the
UN. That's a total falsehood. We are not keeping her out, she's keeping
herself out. All she has to do to get in is to qualify for membership.
I know that in the first sixty-some negotiations we had with Peking (this
was under a Republican administration), we told them that we would sponsor
their membership if they would accept the obligations of membership as
spelled out in the Charter, the first of which is to refrain from the
threat or use of force in international disputes.
It used to be you couldn't get into a university unless you qualified
for admission--even if you had a gun--and that wasn't considered stubborn
discrimination by the university against you.
All that Peking has to do is to qualify, but she refuses to. The UN must
come to her, not the reverse.
[100]
The argument that you cant blame her for being hostile because of the
way we've allegedly insulted or isolated her is another misstatement.
Her hostility is not because of our isolation of her. Our isolation of
her is because of her hostility. I told you how we sent Hurley up to Yenan
to show our good will. We kept our embassy in Nanking to welcome the Communists.
Marshall went over there and practically bowed down before them. He was
sure that they were hostile because hurt and because Chiang was a stubborn
old reactionary cuss who was determined to have a civil war, and so on.
But after, with Marshall's assistance, the Communists had gotten out of
the encirclement they were in, they blistered him, said he had never been
fair, etc.--until he was forced to say in his January 7, 1947 statement,
after he came home from China, "I wish to state to the American people
that in the deliberate misrepresentation and abuse of the action, policies
and purposes of our Government this propaganda (by the Communists) has
been without regard for the truth, without any regard whatsoever for the
facts, and has given plain evidence of a determined purpose to mislead
the Chinese people and to arouse a bitter hatred of Americans."
All those years, the refrain here was that it was
[101]
Chiang Kai-shek who "wants to have a civil war. Chiang wants a civil
war. Chiang wants a civil war." Well he took all these insults in his
efforts to avoid a civil war and build a unified country. But there
was a clause in the Truman directive to Marshall that made unity without
war impossible. It read, "As China moves toward peace and unity,
the United States would be prepared to render every reasonable assistance"
to the government of the Republic of China, give it economic support,
help restore communications, and so on.
Well, that sounded plausible and promptly became a Communist and liberal
slogan. The Daily Worker, in almost every issue, demanded "Peace
and Unity in China. Peace and unity." Whenever that sort of systematic
agitation begins, you had better pay attention. Our people didn't understand
what the slogan meant, but the Chinese Communists did. Obviously they
said to themselves, "Oh, oh, if Chiang gets peace and unity, the United
States is going to give him all this assistance; he will win, we will
lose. But that formula means that if he doesn't get peace and unity, the
United States won't give him assistance; he will lose, we will win. So,
all we have to do to win in China is to see that Chiang doesn't get peace
and unity." And then we wondered
[102]
why Chiang wasn't able to get peace and unity in China:
Last January, Time magazine had two pages of translations of speeches
that Mao Tse-tung made during the '50s that somebody leaked out. And in
one of them as late as 1959 he said, in effect, "Even Russia in 1945 insisted
that we not have a civil war, but we went ahead with a civil war
and we prevailed." So, that blows up another of the lies about Chiang,
that he was responsible for the civil war. He couldn't be expected
to surrender control of the country of which he was the legitimate head.
The only way left to him to prevent its loss was to fight.
How do you get unity with an armed rebellion? One way is to put it down,
but that's war, you see. Of course, that's what we did in 1861
when we had a rebellion, we got unity--by war. But we told Chiang he couldn't
do it that way, he had to get unity and peace. When you have an
armed rebellion you either have to put it down--war--or you have to yield
to it--surrender. Obviously Marshall didn't understand what the directive
said, but the Communists did. It was as plain as day. I made a speech
in Congress in 1947, pointing out that the directive made it impossible
for Chiang to get unity except by
[103]
surrender. Naturally he wouldn't surrender, his duty as the head of the
government was to preserve it. He couldn't surrender, so they had
a civil war. We said Chiang was to blame. But these speeches of
Mao Tse-tung now plainly show the contrary.
Because Russia assumed that we were going to support our ally, Chiang,
after the war as he had faithfully and at great cost supported us and
our wishes during the war, Russia signed an agreement with Nationalist
China on, as I recall, August 15, 1945 in Moscow. After all, we'd won,
and Chiang was on top in China. It never occurred to them, I think, that
we weren't going to stand by Chiang after the war, or that we would walk
out on him as we had on Poland and East Germany, now their satellites.
So Russia promised in the treaty to give postwar aid only to the Nationalist
Government of China. Obviously from Mao's own speeches the Russians tried
to keep him from starting a civil war in China, but he was determined
to seize control of China, so he fought and, with our desertion of Chiang,
he won. When the Russians saw that we weren't going to support our own
ally, China, well, they didn't support it either. They shifted their aid
from Chiang to Mao. I can't really blame them for breaking their word
to Chiang, after our
[104]
action, because if we didn't have brains enough to support our own side,
we couldn't expect them to support our side. They knew our power, they
knew we had just exploded atomic weapons. Clearly they weren't going to
challenge the United States. But although we had overwhelming power, we
told them we wouldn't use it. And there is no such thing as power if you
don't have the will to use it. Appeasement never works in the long run
with such an adversary.
I think another mistake that Mr. Truman made--since you asked me--was
this; he shouldn't have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. I said so at
that time. Because he didn't need to. There again was a case of Soviet
duplicity. The Japanese Emperor had been trying to get in touch with us
since February 1945 to arrange a surrender. But how did he try to do it?
He tried to get to us through the Russians, because the Russians had a
treaty of friendship and non-aggression with Japan. The Russians doublecrossed
him by never sending any of the messages on to us. They wanted the war
to continue in Asia until they could get into it to participate in the
settlement.
Japan was licked in February 1945. The military was prepared to commit
suicide, hari-kari, and continue fighting
[105]
to the end if the Emperor said so. But when the Emperor said, "No," they
followed the Emperor. Probably they were glad that the Emperor said surrender,
but if the Emperor had said die, they would have died. So I think dropping
that bomb was unnecessary and a mistake. I thought so then.
Acheson, seeking to justify our action at Yalta in granting to Russia
rights in Manchuria which did not belong to us and which we had solemnly
promised at Cairo would be returned to China to whom they did belong,
said, "Our concern was to get Russia into the war against Japan and save
American lives." He added, "I myself had a son on a destroyer in the Pacific."
I remember talking about this also in Congress in July, 1950. I said,
"That's an appealing argument and understandable and probably if I'd have
been out there in uniform and facing the possible necessity of having
to land on the Japan mainland and get mowed down, I would have preferred
that we break our word a few times, too." But the fact remains, in Wendell
Willkie's words, "Every drop of blood saved through expediency gets paid
for by twenty drawn by the sword." We perhaps saved some blood there temporarily,
but we've had two wars since that flowed right from our unnecessary expediencies.
HESS: Do you think the Asians had the idea that since we dropped the
bomb on Asians that we
[106]
might not have dropped the bomb on Europeans?
JUDD: No, that's an idea that liberals in America think up. I've never
found that feeling in Asia. The Communists of China also agitate that
line, but you don't find it anywhere else. It's like when I went to Asia
three months ago, some of the liberals said, "Why, Walter, you'll have
trouble out there. They must hate us all for what happened in Mylai."
Well, I would have been astonished to find they hated us for what happened
in Mylai and they didn't. Asians are accustomed to knowing that innocent
people get killed in war. They don't understand why we engage in this
self-torture. When we train and send people out to kill, they inevitably
kill some civilians, too. They can't tell in Vietnam who's a soldier and
who isn't. The Vietcong forces weren't brought up on King Arthur and his
knights. They don't march out with different colored uniforms so each
side will know which are the proper targets to shoot at. They fight wars
to win and without any sense of guilt. That's one reason the Korean soldiers
are probably the best allied soldiers out there. They aren't bothered
by all the scruples we have. And they understand the Vietcong better than
we do. The Vietnamese
[107]
Communists don't crack back at Koreans the way they do at us.
HESS: They know better, don't they?
JUDD: Yes, they know better. Those Koreans just hit a Vietcong on the
back of the neck and break it. One Korean said to me, a Korean Colonel,
not on this trip, a previous one, "You Americans have soft, flabby minds.
You're always worrying about whether this is the right thing to do or
not." He said, "We have small, tight minds. If we're sent out to do a
job, we do it; and if we wound an enemy, we don't rush him back and fill
him full of blood to save his life, we just let him die. We take him out
of his misery and go on to the next man."
Now, I don't want us to become like that, which is one reason we shouldn't
get into this kind of war, I tried my best to keep us out of it.
But after we pulled out troops out of South Korea in 1949 and invited
the North Korean attack; then we were faced not with a theory but an obligation.
They started the war on Sunday. I was on "Town Meeting of the Air" the
next Tuesday night, and I said that we had no choice in the matter then
but to go in to repel the aggression.
[108]
It wasn't just Korea, it was the rest of Asia also, that was at stake.
Having failed to use the methods that could have strengthened South Korea
and prevented the attack, we had no choice except to use force to resist
it. But after we went in and got through the worst of it, had our allied
forces in shape so they could defeat North Korea and the Chinese, the
Russians, you know, sent word by [Jacob A.] Malik, "Why not have some
truce talks?" Now, this was the time to be firm, but we were the opposite.
When the Communists are winning they are just as hard as nails. When
the French were losing at Dienbienphu and asked for a twenty-four hour
truce to evacuate five or six hundred wounded men lying in the mud, the
Reds wouldn't grant it. Their one objective is victory. But when they're
losing, then they act soft and talk peace.
When we're losing is when we're tough. We get up off the floor after
our Pearl Harbors, and go to it. It's when we're winning that we go soft.
If you're in a war, you should stay firm until it's completely over.
I would say it this way, when General [Robert E.] Lee asked for negotiations
at Appomatox, General [Ulysses S] Grant said, "Stack your arms, then we'll
negotiate."
[109]
That's the way to do it--always has been the way. Then after they had
negotiated the surrender, he said, "Let your men keep their side arms
and their mules." But the first thing was, "Stack your arms." When the
Commies say they want to talk, okay, if they stop their fighting first.
In July of 1951 I made a nationwide broadcast on ABC with a reporter
named Jack Steele in which I said, "I would not enter into a truce until,
one, the North Koreans lay down their arms, and two, the Chinese get out
of Korea." Both of those actions, the Chinese entrance into Korea and
the North Korean invasion of the South had been condemned, unanimously,
by the United Nations as aggression. Well, let them withdraw from that
aggression, then we negotiate. If they do that, it's bona fide--their
proposal for truce talks. If they don't do that, it's a trick to get out
of the defeat which they are now facing." But we went right ahead and
talked to them at Panmunjon where they stalled for two years, while they
continued fighting (two-thirds of our 33,000 dead in Korea were killed
while we were talking about a truce). We gave them time to recover and
rebuild their strength, and shift the main effort to Indo-China.
I know that when Ike came in as President in 1953, there wasn't anything
militarily he could do,
[110]
really, without terrific casualties for our forces. In fact, I was in
a meeting at State where this was discussed. This isn't in the record
perhaps but I think it ought to be in this record. What was Ike going
to do about the stalemate in Korea? At the time when Truman agreed to
the talks, almost two years before, there wasn't a single Communist plane
in North Korea. There wasn't an operational airfield. The Communist forces
were really shattered. And under the cease-fire agreement, neither
side was to increase its military strength while the talks were going
on at Panmunjon. We, as usual, followed the agreement circumspectly. We
never put in one new rifle except as we took an old worn-out rifle out,
or sent in a man without taking a man out. Well, the Communists promptly
did the opposite; right away they began to build up their forces and by
the time Ike came in they had something like six hundred planes in North
Korea and a dozen airfields operational. So, Secretary Dulles gave the
estimates to us one morning about April of 1953 (Ike had been in office
a couple or three months). He said, "If we start military action in North
Korea now to compel them to give up the fighting with the 20 to 30 miles
of defenses in depth
[111]
they have now built, the estimate is that it will mean thirty-five thousand
more Americans killed and over a hundred thousand casualties." That's
a pretty hard decision to make. We had them on the ropes in 1951, asking
for a truce and now (1953) we'd given them time in which to rebuild powerful
forces and defenses. It was the same then in Korea as it would be in Vietnam
if we were to attack now and go into North Vietnam to compel Hanoi to
give up its aggression. We'd find it ten times harder now, and an awful
lot more boys would lose their lives than if we had done it several years
ago when North Vietnam was essentially defenseless.
Well, as I recall, there were some twenty members from the Hill in the
State Department for that conference--[John W.] McCormack was there and
[Charles A.] Halleck, and [Sam] Rayburn. [Hubert] Humphrey and [Lyndon
B.] Johnson and [J. William] Fulbright, and [Mike] Mansfield from the
Senate were there, and they all thought we should just continue to talk,
talk, talk, and not give an ultimatum to the other side to end the fighting.
I said, "I dissent," and Bill [William F.] Knowland said, "I dissent,"
and Dick [James P.] Richards, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee
said, "I dissent," and another Congressman from Georgia who's dead now,
I
[112]
can't think of his name, from Rome, Georgia (Henderson Lanham), he was
on our committee, he said, "I dissent." Four of us out of about twenty.
I said, "I think, however many we may lose, even if it takes thirty-five
thousand dead, it will be cheaper in the end. And I think if the Communists
know we mean business and are prepared to go ahead to victory, we won't
have to lose that many." But, the other view prevailed. So, Ike finally
had to use force. He bombed some dams in North Korea, endangered their
food supply--and they promptly negotiated an end to the fighting although
the war for a unified Korea had been lost, by our default.
People should not call it a draw in Korea or even a stalemate. Every
Asian regards it as a defeat for the U. S. as Mao Tse-tung announced right
after the truce agreement. "The great United States has broken its lance."
As they say here in Washington, "An elder statesman is a man who can
still remember when the United States was stronger than countries like
North Korea."
HESS: That's pretty good.
Do you have anything else to add on Mr. Truman or the Truman administration?
[113]
JUDD: No, except, I liked Mr. Truman. Everybody liked him, he's
a good human being. He tended to shoot a little from the hip and
he was a little sputtery--but his instincts were fundamentally sound and
he loved his country. He didn't do anything for unworthy purposes. He
was a good politician and he properly knew the rules of the game, but
I never knew him to do anything underhanded or unworthy, whereas there
are some who have occupied that office--some ahead of him and some since--who
were more attractive personally and smoother and more suave, but who didn't
have his fundamental integrity, or his courage, or his steadfastness.
I think his main errors were mistakes in judgment, not of character or
motivation, and they were understandable mistakes. He had to depend on
the advice of other people, by and large, and much of the advice that
came on foreign policy proved to be faulty. I don't question the motivation
of those advisors but on the record their analyses and judgments were
faulty, at least as far as Asia was concerned. They were mostly correct
as far as Europe was concerned. As I said earlier, it's gratifying that
Mr. Acheson now has reversed himself on Asia and advocates now for Asia
precisely the policy that he was perhaps the leading sponsor of in Europe,
[114]
which is back where we started. If we had just tried in Asia the policies
and approaches we tried in Europe, I'm convinced they would have succeeded.
There was much greater strength out there than was realized. But we didn't
try, and that's the great tragedy.
In almost every speech I have said that this is one planet now, and if
we're to hold the line, we've got to hold both sides of the line, not
just the right side--otherwise people will run around or through the left
side of the line. We've got to hold both Europe and Asia, and the Middle
East and Latin America also. A major loss anywhere in today's contracted
world, will have immediate and deleterious repercussions on all the other
areas. I think part of the trouble was that so many didn't think globally.
They played up all the weaknesses in China. They talked about all the
reasons why we couldn't win instead of finding the means by which we could.
They would always emphasize how bad things are. Well, as a physician,
my job is not to find reasons why I can't get the patient well; my job
is to find means of by which I can get the patient well. I said to Mr.
Acheson once during those years when he and I were at cross-purposes,
"If you see no way to keep China free, sir, why don't you step aside and
let somebody take over who believes it can
[115]
be done. There are people who are pretty intelligent who believe China
can be saved, and the stakes are so great, we must try. Without
any reflection on yourself, I would suggest that if you don't think there
is anything that can be done, just ask to be transferred or step out and
let those take over who believe it can be done."
Henry Luce put it this way, one time in 1948, it was at the Republican
Convention in Philadelphia, "Where there is no will, there is no way."
They didn't have the will to win in China. They regarded as their main
task, how to get rid of that Chiang Kai-shek. He was considered the main
obstacle, not the Communists. There wasn't any will to succeed.
HESS: What did Mr. Acheson say when you suggested that he step aside.
JUDD: Oh, he just got red.
I was also there when he used that phrase, "All we can do is wait until
the dust settles." I said, "That means only, wait until China goes Communist.
That's the only way such a policy can end. Let's not use the phrase "dust
settles;" what that means is that we just wait until we've lost this
[116]
greatest body of manpower in the world to our mortal enemy. I am not
willing to agree to that."
I had rather strenuous arguments with him in those years. But I wrote
and congratulated him when he came out and publicly urged for Vietnam
the same policy of proper assistance that he had urged in '47 for Greece
and Turkey. I sent along a copy of what I had said during the Greek-Turkey
debates in which I supported his policies 100 percent in Europe. But,
I had added in that speech that if we didn't do it also in Asia, we'd
be in trouble.
He wrote back to thank me for your letter and said, "you were quite right
that what you said in 1947 is painfully pertinent twenty years later."
Then he added that sound policies (Mr. Lippmann to the contrary) "do not
wear out or become obsolete like models of automobiles merely by the passage
of time." I mean, the policy was right then in Europe, the policy is right
now in Asia. Lippmann had fought him on the Greece-Turkey program because
the Greek government was allegedly so corrupt. Acheson was the man who
put the Greek-Turkey program over. He was the chief architect and persuasive
exponent of it. He's a real scholar, and
[117]
if you prick him a little sometimes his face gets red, but he's a man
of distinction. I had the greatest respect for him, even when I disagreed
with him on Asia. Unfortunately he didn't know anything first-hand about
Asia; he did about Europe.
HESS: Why do you think the State Department had the right view about
Europe and the wrong view about Asia?
JUDD: It was largely a matter of the persons in charge. The Asia division
had been loaded with left-wingers for years and years. Lenin had said,
"The way to Paris is through Peking." And perhaps his greatest victory
was to get us to concentrate on Europe while he was going after Asia--as
the way to Europe later. So, Moscow was pretty conciliatory in Europe
when we took a strong stand there, and not too belligerent. It turned
to Asia first. I try to describe it this way: for the Communists China
was first base. But you get to first base only to try to get to second
base. Second base is the fifteen countries lying around China beginning
with Korea and going in a crescent to Afghanistan. In them live a third
of the people of the world. And if Vietnam goes down, the Commies will
soon have effective control of second base. Then they plan, of course,
[118]
to get to third base; third base is the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin
America. These are all like the "countryside" in China was, as Mao Tse-tung
and Lin Piao called it, in contrast to the North Atlantic area, which
was comparable to the big cities of China. Get the "countryside" first,
to isolate the "cities." It worked in China; naturally they are confident
they can make it work in the world struggle, despite temporary failures
or setbacks here or there.
But you don't go to third base to stop. You go to third base to get home.
And home is us. The unvarying purpose is to encircle the United States
from the outside and demoralize it from within.
The long-range target in every one of these struggles has always been
the United States. It wasn't Chiang Kai-shek, it wasn't Syngman
Rhee, it isn't General Thieu, it's the United States. If in Vietnam
they can humiliate the United States, show the world that we don't today
have the resolution, the ingenuity, the resourcefulness, the steadfastness
to prevail in that brushfire war, so-called, then what country in the
world can count on us to be of dependable assistance to it when its time
of testing comes, a little further down the road? They have been just
as sharp, and
[119]
shrewd, and ruthless in pursuing these clever moves--and thus far as
successful--as we have been unclever, and unshrewd, and unsuccessful in
pursuing our policy of trying to get along with them by showing them how
nice we are. Shouldn't we help them win, as the way to make them lose?
No--the way to make them lose is to make them lose.
You and I, and our children, are never going to be able to relax until
Communism fades or changes. What will make it fade? When it doesn't have
any more victories to feed upon. Therefore, don't give it any more victories.
Any government that isn't winning some victories has got to change its
policies or fade.
What will make Communism change? Communism will change when Communists
change; I think they may be changing somewhat in the Soviet Union.
It was the intellectuals in almost every society who supported Communists
at the outset, because they were unhappy about existing conditions--the
same as it is the intellectuals who are most unhappy about conditions
in our country, the race problems, the slums, the ghettos, the lack of
opportunity and jobs for some. The young idealist and the intellectual
tend to grab the Communist
[120]
formula because it promises everything will be much better. Then when
he sees the result is worse than before, it's the intellectual who turns
against it. It's the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain today who are
our best allies in some respects.
[Leonid Ilyich] Brezhnev is throwing them into concentration camps, banning
their works and so on. Mao Tse-tung closes all the universities and sends
a hundred and sixty thousand professors down into the countryside, he
said, to "get close to the people and learn the wisdom of the people."
Of course, that isn't the real reason. He's afraid of them. He wants to
have them scattered all through the countryside instead of being in the
cities and universities where they can organize and get the students stirred
up. He would know how to do that because it was largely by working on
the students, appealing to their idealism, that he won China. He isn't
going to let his enemies do the same thing to him.
So, the intellectual gets us into internal trouble by being dissatisfied
with what is. He doesn't usually compare what is with the available
alternative--something worse. He compares it with the ideal. He wants
the impossible perfect, and in the process he loses the imperfect possible.
[121]
I'll always work for the imperfect possible.
As our forefathers said, "To form a more perfect union." They
didn't say a perfect union. A perfect union would have meant regimentation,
a tyranny. They wanted a more perfect union--the possible even
though not perfect. I hope that maybe we can move in that direction in
our country and today's world. But I find that the other groups, unless
Mr. [Spiro] Agnew is able to stir up the silent majority, are still gaining
because they've got a cause they are working for with dedication while
we're largely on the defensive. The one on the defensive is at a disadvantage.
His cry is only this, please be nice enough to leave me alone, no matter
what you do to others.
People often say, "Well, we've got to give and take in our negotiations.
But what do they suggest we give this time? We can't give North Korea,
we gave that before; we can't give Poland, we gave that before; we can't
give East Germany, or the Kurile Islands. They've been given. What are
we going to give this time? South Vietnam? How about Thailand? We've given
them East Germany, why not now give them West Germany? During the Formosa
crisis a British friend said, "Well, why not
[122]
give them Formosa, it's just an island."
I said, "Why not give them Great Britain, it's just an island." I couldn't
get him interested.
It's an old trick, and never works--to try to get peace by giving away
some other country. When this is brought up in a church meeting, I say,
"I'm a follower of a man who at the Last Supper didn't say, 'This is somebody
else's body broken for you.' He said, 'This is my body broken for
you.' If we're prepared to give the United States, that could be redemptive.
I don't know what the Communists would do if we'd offer them ourselves
instead of offering them Laos or some other distant place. But, of course,
we aren't going to do that. I don't know many who would be willing to
do it. And I know further that it won't happen because it takes a majority
in Congress to act and a majority won't vote for anything like that. Instead
we try to buy our enemies off by the bribe of sacrificing our principles
and other people's rights and territory--their freedom."
Mr. Churchill gave the answer to that as Mr. Nixon quoted in one of his
speeches before he became President, Churchill said, "The belief that
it is possible to obtain security by throwing another small state to the
wolves
[123]
is a fatal delusion." And yet we are tempted to try again to get security
for ourselves by doing just that. All it does is enhance the wolf's appetite,
increase his confidence and weaken his respect for us, thereby increasing
the danger. This seems to me so obvious that it always astonishes me that
it seems so hard for so many people to understand or believe it. There
is no peace in appeasement.
HESS: We're about to run out of tape. All for one afternoon?
JUDD: Probably too much for one afternoon. I didn't intend to be so long.
HESS: Thank you very much.
[Top of the Page | Notices
and Restrictions | Interview Transcript
| List of Subjects Discussed]
List of Subjects Discussed
Acheson, Dean G., 56, 70, 72,
105, 113, 114,
115, 116, 117
Afghanistan, 117
Africa, 118
Agnew, Spiro T., 121
Aleutian Islands, 56
Amerasia Case, 49, 75, 76
Ames, Iowa, 5
Asia, 45, 46, 64
Asia policy, 40, 69, 72,
77, 81, 98, 106,
113, 114, 116,
117, 118
Assam (India), 61
Atcheson, George, 78
Atomic bomb, 104, 105
Atomic weapons, 29
Attlee, Clement, 30, 31, 34
Australia, 3, 51, 56
Badger, Oscar C., 49
Ball, Joseph H., 2, 13, 18,
19, 22
Ballantine, Joseph W., 77
Barbey, Daniel E., 49, 50
Barr, David G., 48, 49
Barr Report on China, 48
Berlin, West, 35
Bilbo, Theodore G., 92
Bipartisan foreign policy, 22-24, 25,
56
Brezhnev, Leonid I., 120
B2H2 Midwestern tour (1943), 4-11, 14-17,
19-22
B2H2 Resolution, 3, 4, 6,
15, 17, 18, 22,
23, 25, 84
Bullitt, William C., 88
Burton, Harold H., 2, 22
Cairo Conference (1943), 71, 82,
105
Canada, 23, 51
Canton, China, 81
Chennault, Claire, 51
Chiang Kai-shek:
Civil war in China, and the, 47, 50-53,
60, 70, 71, 80,
81, 100-104, 115,
118
Formosa Straits closure by the U.S. Seventh Fleet, reaction to, 79,
80
Korean War, and the, 32, 33, 36,
37
Marshall, George C., relationship with, 81-83
Quemoy and Matsu Islands, defense of, 58
Red China, as a counterbalance to in the Vietnam War, 74
Sino-Japanese War, and the, 39
Stillwell, Joseph W., relationship with, 81, 82
Wedemeyer, Albert C., relationship with, 82
China (Communist)
Korean War, and the, 28, 34, 109
Quemoy and Matsu Islands, threat to, 58
recognition of, 45, 55, 56,
79, 80, 98-100
U.S. foreign policy options concerning, 97-100
Vietnam War, possible intervention in, 73, 74
China (Nationalist)
aid to, 39
Civil War in, 40, 42, 43,
46-54, 60, 61,
69-71, 76, 80-83,
100-104, 114, 115,
118
Lend-lease to in World War II, 61
military assistance to, 43, 46-49,
54, 55, 61, 62,
71, 72
policy toward in Civil War, 50-55, 60-62,
69-71, 80-83, 100-104,
114, 115
Chinese Communists, Civil War chronology, 50-54, 71,
80, 81, 100-104
Chinese Communists, Soviet aid to in Civil War, 51,
53
Churchill, Winston S., 51, 52
Communist global strategy, 117-119, 121-123
Communist national evolution in the Soviet Union, 119,
120
Connally, Tom, 84
Cooke, Charles M., 49
Coral Sea, Battle of the, 3
Cornhusker Hotel, 7
Cox, James M., 14
Curley, James M., 92
The Daily Worker, 101
Davenport, Iowa, 4
Davies, John Payton, 74
De Gasperi, Alcide, 70
Democratic National Convention, 1944, 12
Democratic party, 13, 14, 92,
93
Des Moines, Iowa, 5
Dewey, Thomas E., 90, 91
Dienbienphu, Vietnam, 108
Drake University, 5
Dulles, John F., 62, 94, 95,
110
East Germany (German Democratic Republic), 121
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 27, 36, 63,
69, 94, 95, 109-112
Elections See: Presidential elections
Emmerson, John, 74
Emporia, Kansas, 8, 11
England, 2, 3
Europe, U.S. policy toward, 24
Far East, 23
Fitzgerald, John F., 92
"The Five Lies About China," 60
Formosa Straits, 79
Formosa, U.S. policy toward, 32-34, 36,
37, 43-46, 54,
55, 57, 58, 78-80,
121, 122
Foreign alliances, 24, 25
Fort Dodge, Iowa, 4
Fulbright, J. William, 25, 31, 32,
34, 111
Grady, Henry F., 78
Grand Island, Nebraska, 8, 9
Grant, Ulysses S., 108
Great Britain, 22, 51, 55
Greece, Aid to, 39-42, 78
Grew, Joseph C., 77
Haiphong, North Vietnam, 65
Halleck, Charles A., 111
Harriman, Averell, 85, 87
Hart, Thomas C., 49
Hastings, Nebraska, 8, 9
Hatch, Carl A., 2, 4, 5,
17, 22
Hay, John, 23
Hickenlooper, Bourke B., 5
Hill, Lister, 2, 17, 18,
22
Hirohito, Emperor, 51, 104, 105
Hiss, Alger, 78, 87
Hopkins, Harry, 87, 89
Hornbeck, Stanley K., 77
Hull, Cordell, 24
Humphrey, Hubert H., 111
Hurley, Patrick J., 80, 100
India, 45, 55, 61
Indianola, Iowa, 3
Indo-China, 78, 109
Iowa, 4, 5
Iowa State University, 5
Iran, 78
Iron Curtain, 120
Isolationism, 1, 2, 6,
13, 14, 16, 24
Italy, 70
Jackson County, Missouri, 9, 10
Jaffe, Philip, 75, 76
Japan:
Atomic bombing of, 104, 105
China "open door policy," opposition to, 23, 24
defense of by the United States, 56
Dulles, John F., trip to, 94, 95
Korea and the defense of, 35
Kuantung army, 51
MacArthur, Douglas, dismissal of as head of U.S. occupation forces,
94, 95
occupation of by U.S. military forces, 78
peace treaty with, 94, 95
Sino-Japanese War, 71, 75
surrender of to the allies at end of World War II, 105
World War II participation, 3
Japanese Peace Treaty, 94
Johnson, Lyndon B., 28, 67, 111
Joints Chiefs of Staff, 93, 94
Kansas City, Missouri, 9-12
Kelly-Nash machine, 92
Kennan, George F., 87-89
Kincaid, Thomas G., 49
Knowland, William F., 111
Korean War:
atomic weapons, possible use of, 29
Chinese Nationalist troops, proposed use of in, 32-34,
36, 37, 73
MacArthur, Douglas, dismissal of as UN Commander in, 26,
27, 69, 93-95
North Korean food supply, attack on, 69
origins of, 56, 57, 107,
108
Panmunjom talks, 27-29, 108-112
Taiwan, inspection trip by General MacArthur to, 57,
58
Truman-Attlee talks, 1950, 30, 31
Kuantung army, 51
Kurile Islands, 121
Landham, Henderson, 112
Laos, 34, 122
Latin America, 114, 118
Lee, Robert E., 108
Lend-lease to China in World War II, 61
Lenin, Nikolai, 117
Lincoln, Abraham, 68
Lincoln, Nebraska, 7
Lin Piao, 118
Lippmann, Walter, 39, 92, 116
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 25
Luce, Henry, 115
Lundeen, Ernest, 19
MacArthur, General Douglas:
China, military assistance to, World War II, 50
Chinese Nationalist troops, proposed use of in the Korean War, 32
dismissal of as UN Commander in Japan and Korea, 26,
27, 29, 93-96
Japan, as Commander of U.S. occupation forces, 1945, 78
Taiwan, inspection trip to, 1950, 57-59
MacArthur, Jean (Mrs. Douglas), 94
McCormack, John W., 111
McKinley, William, 23
Malik, Jacob A., 108
Manchuria, 50, 51, 53,
54, 71, 81, 82,
83, 105
Mansfield, Mike, 111
Mao Tse-Tung, 80, 81, 97,
98, 102, 103,
112, 118, 120
Marshall, George C., 40, 42, 50-53,
71, 72, 81-83, 100-102
Mason City, Iowa, 4
Matsu Island, 58
Middle East, 114
Midway, Battle of, 3
Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, 90
Monroe Doctrine, 23
Monte Cassino, Italy, 66, 67
Mukden, Manchuria, 54
Mutual Security, 20-22, 23, 25
Nanking, China, 81, 100
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 44, 55
Ngo Dinh Diem, 65
Nguyen Cao Ky, 65
Nguyen Van Thieu, 92, 118
Nine Power Conference, 24
Nixon, Richard M., 28, 34
Norris, George, 9
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 25
North Korea, 69, 107-109, 110,
112, 121
North Vietnam, 30, 34, 50,
65-68, 111
Norton, Robert, 75
Omaha, Nebraska, 8, 9
Open Door Policy, 23
Panmunjom talks, 27, 29, 108-112
Paris negotiations (Vietnam War), 28
Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on, 3
Peking, China, 56
Pendergast machine, 10
Pentagon, 93
Philippines, 78, 156
Poage, Robert, 85
Poland, 86, 87, 103,
121
Political machines, 92, 93
Presidential election of 1920, 14
Presidential election of 1948, 90, 91
Quemoy Island, 54
Radford, Arthur W., 54
Rayburn, Sam, 111
Red River delta, North Vietnam, 68
Republican National Convention of 1948, 115
Republican party, 13, 14, 90,
91
Rhee, Syngman, 118
Richards, James P., 111
Rising City, Nebraska, 9
Romania, 86
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 12, 14,
22, 24, 71, 78,
84-87, 89, 92
St. Louis, Missouri, 14, 19, 20
Salina, Kansas, 8, 14
San Francisco Conference (UN), 12, 25
Schapp, Frank, 17
Service, John Stewart, 49, 74, 75,
76, 80, 81
Seventh Fleet, U.S. Navy, 33, 57,
59
Shanghai, China, 58
Sheridan, Philip, 68
Sherman, William T., 68
Simpson College, 5
Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, 24, 47,
71, 75
Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1945, 103
Southeast Asia, 44, 45
South Korea:
defense of by the U.S., 56
geopolitical importance of, 117
military assistance to, 43
North Korean invasion of in 1950, 56, 107,
108
U.S. military evacuation of in 1949, 35, 36,
38, 57, 107
Soviet Union, 23, 35, 47,
51, 75, 83, 85,
86, 88, 102-105,
108, 117, 119,
120
South Vietnam, 34, 63-66, 92,
93, 116, 117,
121
Spruance, Raymond A., 49
Stassen, Harold, 18, 19
State Department:
Asia policy, 117
China (Nationalist) demand for internal reforms in, 59
China (Nationalist) policy toward, 48, 61,
62, 74, 75
Formosa, policy toward, 33, 44
Japan, delegation sent to assist General MacArthur in the occupation
of, 78
Korean War, conference at to end, 110, 111
Korean War, policy during, 37
MacArthur, General Douglas, opposition to, 93-95
Personnel, recommendations by Walter Judd re, 77,
78
Taiwan, policy toward, 58
Steele, Jack, 109
Stilwell, Joseph W., 48, 78, 80-82
Stuart, John Leighton, 81
Tachen Islands, 58
Taiwan:
Communist China, as a deterrent to in the Vietnam War, 73,
74
defense of by the U.S., 56, 57
Korean War, and the, 33, 37, 38
MacArthur inspection trip to in 1950, 57, 58
U.S. Seventh Fleet ordered to seal off from China, 79
Tammany Hall, 92
Tehran Conference (1943), 71, 82
Thailand, 121
Time magazine, 102
Topeka, Kansas, 8, 11
Truman, Bess Wallace, 7, 8
Truman Committee, 14-18
Truman Doctrine, 38-40, 69, 91,
92, 116
Truman, Harry S.:
assessment of, 113
and the atomic bombing of Japan, 104, 105
Attlee, Clement, talks with during the Korean War, 30,
31a, 32
B2H2 midwestern tour of the U.S. in 1943, 4-12, 14-17
China (Communist) policy toward, 45, 55,
57, 79, 80
China (Nationalist) and aid to, 43, 46-50,
54, 55
China (Nationalist) policy toward, 39-41
Chinese Nationalist troops, and proposed use of during the Korean War,
32-34, 36
Formosa policy, 38, 43-46, 54-56,
79, 80
German POW Camp in Salina, Kansas, visit to in 1943, 8
and Greek Civil War, 41
History, place in, 96
Inaugural address of 1949, 59
Judd, Walter, first acquaintance with, 1, 4-12
Judd, Walter, relationship with, 13, 14
Korea, and U.S. military evacuation of in 1949, 37
MacArthur, Douglas, dismissal of as UN Commander in Japan and Korea,
26, 27, 29, 93,
94
Marshall, George C., directive to re U.S. policy in Chinese Civil War,
101-103
Panmunjom talks during the Korean War, and the, 28
Pendergast machine, and the, 10
Presidential campaign of 1948, and the, 91
speaker, as a, 5-7
Truman Committee, and the, 15
wife Bess, relationship with, 7, 8
United Nations, 2, 3, 4,
12, 18, 20, 98,
99, 109
Van Fleet, James A., 41, 42, 43
Versailles Conference, 25
Viet Cong, 65, 106, 107
Vietnam War, 3, 26-30, 34,
63-68, 73, 74,
96, 106, 107,
111, 118
Vincent, John Carter, 74
Vladivostok, USSR, 47, 51
Vyshinski, Andrei, 86
Wallace, Henry A., 12
Washington, George, 24
Wedemeyer, Albert C., 41, 49, 50,
78, 82
West Germany, 121
White House, 90
White Paper on China, 70, 76
Wichita, Kansas, 8
Willkie, Wendell, 105
Wilson, Woodrow, 23, 24, 25
Winant, John, 87
World communist strategy, 117-119, 121-123
World War I, 1
World War II, 1, 2, 3,
8
Yalta Conference, 82, 85-89, 105
Yalu River, 27, 28, 30,
34
Yarnell, Harry E., 49
Yenan, China, 80, 100
[Top of the Page | Notices
and Restrictions | Interview Transcript
| List of Subjects Discussed]
|