Word: formosae
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...bitingly clear (TIME, Jan. 2) that this was the time and the hour finally to weld a coherent foreign-policy program for Asia. It fell to grey, soldierly Omar Bradley to report, in grey, soldierly words, the J.C.S. decision of the preceding week to stiffen the defense of Formosa, Nationalist China's island stronghold, with a small U.S. military mission. As General Bradley droned on, he knew he was outlining a Pentagon reversal of the State Department's flaccid policy of waiting for something to turn up in Asia. No professional, he did his plain-spoken best...
Acheson, for his part, was very much at the ready, primed for this major crisis with a practiced lawyer's burnished skill and tailor-made logic, bent on reversing the J.C.S. decision on Formosa. Omar...
Bradley had hardly paused for breath before the Secretary of State seized the argument and virtually turned Bradley into a defense witness under crossexamination. The U.S., said Acheson, should stay the whole way out of Formosa unless it was prepared to go the whole way in. The J.C.S. plan for a small military mission to Formosa was another example, he said, of too little & too late. It was an Asiatic pattern which the State Department was qualified to recognize...
...Joint Chiefs prepared to back up this military mission with troops, ships and squadrons if something went wrong with the calculations, if the Communists beat the Nationalists to the punch again? Hadn't even Douglas MacArthur (who had influenced the J.C.S. decision to send a mission to Formosa) said that the island did not warrant the commitment of U.S. troops? What did the Joint Chiefs hope to gain by risking the U.S.'s reputation and its military mission in such a shaky gesture...
...cautious chiefs and MacArthur had carefully decided that the modest military mission would work, or that just such risk-taking had been the basis for defeats of Communism from Berlin to Athens, Dean Acheson wrapped his defense in offense, moved swiftly into a series of counterproposals which carefully omitted Formosa. But at long last, they did put the Department of State on record with a program for Asia. Highlights...