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.

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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 It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.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

[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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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."

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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.

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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."

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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

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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."

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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