Word: generalize
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Patriotic Communists. Strange and disturbing scenes from the past-some vicious, some tragically funny-rose from the pages of the Government's record. There was irascible old General Stilwell, in 1944, sneering in his reports to Washington over Chiang's reluctance to swallow "the bitter pill of recognizing the Communists"-as if recognition of the Communists would be plain good medicine for a government needing a cathartic. The same year saw the dispatch of Henry Wallace, of all citizens, to Chiang to urge accord with the Communists. There was sardonic humor in the State Department record...
...wisdom was corrupted by power, his reason corroded by fear. He balked at the zealous U.S. envoys who urged and arranged negotiations with Communist leaders. As he became ever more stubbornly sure that Chinese unity could be won only by whipping the Red armies in battle, U.S. advisers from General Marshall down ever more firmly warned he could not win. They still thought China should make a deal with the Communists. Dead set against any deal of the kind, Chiang cockily prophesied: "Given time, the ripe apple will fall into our laps...
From the U.S. embassy in Chungking came a series of reports and recommendations which sounded fantastically gullible when set against today's knowledge of Communist General Mao's fealty to Moscow. Arms must be given to the Red forces, it was urged, "to hold the Communists to our side instead of throwing them into the arms of the Soviet Union." Another Foreign Service officer hailed the Communist revolution as "moderate and democratic," giving the people "democratic self-government, political consciousness and a sense of their rights." As far back as 1944 one embassy report flatly declared the Communists...
This eerie blend of fatalism and foolishness formed the background for the Marshall mission. Painstakingly, the white paper gives the now painful details: the suspension of arms shipments to Chiang to allow the U.S. a brief, bootless masquerade as a neutral arbiter between Chiang and the Communists; and General Marshall's increasing infatuation with the dream of building a middle-of-the-road "liberal" party from scattered political factions in a nation at fatal war with itself. From those factions that inspired such hope, only one leader later rose to power: General Li Tsung-jen, who last year proposed...
...this point, Lieut. General Albert Wedemeyer had surveyed the scene in late IQJ? and reported to President Truman: the dangers to the U.S. in China were "as portentous as those leading to World War II." His recommendation: a sweeping fiveyear aid program, dependent on drastic domestic reforms in China. His prophetic warning: "A 'wait-and-see' policy would lead to ... disturbance verging on chaos, at the end of which the Chinese Communists would emerge as the dominant group." The U.S. did more than ignore Wedemeyer's recommendations. It suppressed release of his report until last week...