FOREIGN RELATIONS: For Better or for Worse

Most of the others were waiting as Secretary of State Dean Acheson slipped through the side entrance of the White House executive wing and strode into the Cabinet room. He took his seat at the long, polished table, opened up his little tan leather dispatch case, waited for the conference to begin. At the table there were owlishly grave Treasury Secretary John Snyder, Acting Commerce Secretary Cornelius Vanderbilt (“Sonny”) Whitney, intelligence counselors and a brace of presidential aides. For the Defense Department also present were Under Secretary Steve Early, Navy Secretary Francis Matthews and General Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And there was Harry Truman, as he had promised, presiding over one of his rare sessions with the National Security Council.

They buckled briskly to business. The President had made it bitingly clear (TIME, Jan. 2) that this was the time and the hour finally to weld a coherent foreign-policy program for Asia. It fell to grey, soldierly Omar Bradley to report, in grey, soldierly words, the J.C.S. decision of the preceding week to stiffen the defense of Formosa, Nationalist China’s island stronghold, with a small U.S. military mission. As General Bradley droned on, he knew he was outlining a Pentagon reversal of the State Department’s flaccid policy of waiting for something to turn up in Asia. No professional, he did his plain-spoken best.

The Absent Critic. It was not an impressive effort, but Infantryman Bradley had to carry the argument alone. Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, the Administration’s most severe critic of State’s lethargy in China, was off vacationing at the time of decision. It was Johnson who was partly responsible for needling the President into action, who had privately boasted: “I’ll keep asking what our policy on China is until I find out.” Yet, when the time for battle came, Louis Johnson was away: he had been traced to the swank Jupiter Island Club at Hobe Sound, Fla. the day before the long-awaited showdown of the armed services with Secretary of State Acheson.

Acheson, for his part, was very much at the ready, primed for this major crisis with a practiced lawyer’s burnished skill and tailor-made logic, bent on reversing the J.C.S. decision on Formosa. Omar

Bradley had hardly paused for breath before the Secretary of State seized the argument and virtually turned Bradley into a defense witness under crossexamination. The U.S., said Acheson, should stay the whole way out of Formosa unless it was prepared to go the whole way in. The J.C.S. plan for a small military mission to Formosa was another example, he said, of too little & too late. It was an Asiatic pattern which the State Department was qualified to recognize.

Were the Joint Chiefs prepared to back up this military mission with troops, ships and squadrons if something went wrong with the calculations, if the Communists beat the Nationalists to the punch again? Hadn’t even Douglas MacArthur (who had influenced the J.C.S. decision to send a mission to Formosa) said that the island did not warrant the commitment of U.S. troops? What did the Joint Chiefs hope to gain by risking the U.S.’s reputation and its military mission in such a shaky gesture?

Counter-Proposals. Before anybody could point out that both the cautious chiefs and MacArthur had carefully decided that the modest military mission would work, or that just such risk-taking had been the basis for defeats of Communism from Berlin to Athens, Dean Acheson wrapped his defense in offense, moved swiftly into a series of counterproposals which carefully omitted Formosa. But at long last, they did put the Department of State on record with a program for Asia. Highlights:

¶An increase in U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force in the Western Pacific.

¶Military aid for the uneasy Philippines, facing the rising specter of Chinese Communism to the north and west, and threatened by the possible Communist occupation of Formosa. ¶Economic aid and civil defense arms for the new United States of Indonesia (see FOREIGN NEWS). ¶U.S. aid to the French forces in Indo-China, which State considers the most effective anti-Communist armies now fighting in east Asia, and simultaneous pressure on Paris to help Emperor Bao Dai cut his puppet strings and set up an independent, popular government in Indo-China.

¶Economic strengthening of Japan and south Korea, presumably with U.S. cash. ¶Military aid for Korea, closest of all to the shadow of Communist armies across the 38th parallel to the north. ¶No recognition of the Chinese Communists until they have proved to have internationally acceptable manners.

After Acheson had turned his last careful phrase, Harry Truman allowed little time for rebuttal. Here, at last, was a package he could take to a restive Congress. Quickly he made his decision: he would side with Dean Acheson, overrule the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There would be no military mission to Formosa. The

U.S. would embrace the Acheson plan for containment around the non-Chinese perimeter of the great, complete Communist state. Did anyone disagree? Nobody disagreed very vigorously.

Goodbye to Formosa. Later the Pentagon was still wondering how Acheson had done it. The Joint Chiefs, after all, were supposed to be the guardians of military strategy and the assessors of risk. “I predict,” said one conferee drearily, “that the Communists will have Formosa within six months.”

Less than an hour later, the Navy announced that the aircraft carrier Boxer, with a normal complement of 90 planes, and two escorting destroyers, would beef up the 7th Task Fleet based on the Philippines. Next day the Joint Chiefs said they would leave next month for a conference with MacArthur and an inspection trip of U.S. forces in Japan “contemplated for several months.”

Formosa had been abandoned, and with it, one chance for the U.S. to show decisively that it meant to be resolute in containing Communism in Asia. But for better or for worse, the U.S. did have the beginnings of a foreign policy in Asia, and as even the defeated J.C.S. would have to admit, that was progress.