Word: achesons
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...more than a year, State had been assembling a treatise on China. Acheson had his close friend, now Ambassador at Large Philip Jessup, reassemble and edit it and dropped it like a finishing bomb on Chiang's all but lost cause...
...Nationalist armies that "did not have to be defeated; they disintegrated." There was some opposition in the department to issuing the White Paper, and even Philip Jessup has since admitted that it was a highly irregular piece of diplomacy. The one reason for issuing it was to provide Acheson's State Department with an alibi for its share in China's tragic disaster...
...Book. Two other incidents closed, or were supposed to close, the book on Chiang Kaishek. In December 1940 the Joint Chiefs of Staff tentatively decided to send a military mission to Chiang's transplanted government on Formosa. The Joint Chiefs thus acknowledged Formosa's strategic importance; Acheson overrode them...
...weeks later, before the National Press Club, Acheson drew the U.S. defense line in the Pacific from AIaska to the Philippines, and declared: "So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific [e.g., Formosa, Korea] is concerned it must be clear that no person can guarantee those areas against military attack." That statement signified the great U.S. write-off of Asia...
...Thousand Reasons. Acheson argued in the White Paper that, short of a "colossal commitment of our armies," there was nothing the U.S. could have done to save China, that the destiny of that massive, torn country was out of U.S. hands. Certainly Chiang's government, with its one-party rule, its graft and its unpopularity, had a great deal to do with its own collapse; Mao Tse-tung's toughness and shrewdness had much to do with the Communists' triumph. But the pertinent fact for Americans was that their own State Department, by its acts...