Word: achesons
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...people, as for its State Department, this was a moment of rare anguish; an autopsy on a friend is not nice work. With such diplomatic surgery, Secretary of State Dean Acheson (and the staff of 80 who had worked on the white paper) had operated on the prostrate body of Nationalist China. Their task was complicated by the fact that the body was still stubbornly squirming with life...
...Frank Record." What had caused the disease and the disaster? The State Department's answer, said Dean Acheson, was "a frank record of an extremely complicated and most unhappy period in the life of a great country." The record, reviewing U.S. relations with China back to 1844, prefaced by a 15-page lawyer's brief by Acheson, and displaying some studied flourishes of erudition, added up to a savage indictment of China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. Acheson summarized...
...fumbling, vacillating attempts to help Nationalist China, the U.S. had actually spent $2 billion. It was a sum, said Acheson, "of proportionately greater magnitude in relation to the budget of that Government than the United States has provided to any nation of Western Europe since...
...Oriental Munich." This was the end of the tragic China road-but had not much of it been paved with shiny, good American intentions? Acheson argued vigorously that the U.S. could not have done more: "It is obvious that the American people would not have sanctioned ... a colossal commitment of our armies in 1945 or later . . . The ominous result . . . was beyond the control of the Government of the United States . . . Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country...
Hard Core. To bolster Acheson, the U.S.'s highest brass marched up to Capitol Hill. Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, flanked by the Navy's Admiral Denfeld and the Air Force's General Hoyt Vandenberg, spoke for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Said Missouri-born Omar Bradley, whose vivid prose is the match of Acheson's: "We can surely anticipate that any aggressor will alternatively press and quell the crises, hoping to hold the [North Atlantic Treaty] powers in perpetual irresolution. But irresolution has no apology. It is born of fear and selfishness...