I'm Shane Harris, I'm a fellow here at New America and a staff writer with the Washington Post and I am really really excited and pleased to be here with my friend Daniel Kurtz-Valen to talk about his new book, The China Mission, George C. Marshall's Unfinished War. Dan and I both came to New America, I think at this in the same class together, and when he laid out the scope and ambition of his book, as all fellows kind of had to do and told me about the work process and the research that he was planning, I remember thinking to myself I'm really glad that you're writing that book and not me, because it was really a truly just incredibly ambitious topic that he was taking on and a great task and I'm happy to say, and I'm not just saying this because I'm sitting here with them and think very highly of them, it's a terrific book. It is a really tremendous narrative, a part of history with which I was not familiar and was shocked to find how unfamiliar I was with this incredibly consequential 13 months that takes place that is sort of the boundary of this book. So just to briefly introduce the author here, Dana was a fellow as I said here at New America and is now the executive editor of Foreign Affairs Magazine and germane to the topic really of this book served on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff under Secretary Clinton. So has the benefit of having both worked as a diplomat and with diplomats but also as a journalist and an historian and it really informs the the the narrative of this book and the richness of it. So what we'll do here is we'll talk some about the book for half an hour or so and then I'd love to ask the audience to ask Dan your questions about things that we've talked about or periods that interest in history of the book also frankly to think about what lessons this holds for our current relationship with China and China's place in the world and we're gonna kind of get to some of that as we talk in the book as well so we'll spend another half an hour or so doing that as well. So then the first thing I want to start with and in really this book I mean it is very much a story and I find that really gratifying both because I like to write narrative journalism but it really is illuminating in that respect this is not this is dense material but you've really brought it to life so I want you to just sort of start by setting the scene for us for where the book begins it's the end of World War II George Marshall and you'll say a little bit about him for those who may not be familiar with which this crowd I can't imagine no one is unfamiliar had been chief of the Army and he gets tapped for another mission this time a much harder mission perhaps of keeping the peace so sort of set the scenes for us and talk about what the stakes were in that moment. So to the extent people today and I presume most of you in this room know who Marshall is we think of him as the kind of seminal army figure during World War II we think of him as the secretary of state who created the Marshall Plan and the Marshall Plan is named after him but at this moment at the end of right at the end of World War II in 1945 he's really one of the most towering figures in the world he's just spent six years as army chief of staff he started that job the morning that Hitler invaded Poland so he's really been central to the history and the allied victory over the Nazis and Japanese in that period he has this incredible public profile in the United States and internationally you read what Churchill says about him what Truman says about him and they all say some version of he's the one of the greatest military leaders that has ever lived he has a public profile in the United States that is kind of unrivaled by it by anyone we can think of today he's times man of the year there's a draft Marshall movement trying to persuade him to run for president and he has has this kind of incredible esteem internationally but he's been in this job for six years he is exhausted and he really wants to retire he's about to turn 65 and his wife Catherine has their vacations planned and so he has a retirement ceremony at the Pentagon which is a new building at the time and the next day they are driving out to Leesburg Virginia where they have their house and ready to they're ready to begin their retirement Marshall walks through the door with his wife and within minutes the phone rings in his house in Leesburg and it's the president on the phone and Truman says to Marshall I just need one last favor from you I need you to do one last thing for me before you can truly retire and Truman knows that Marshall is going to say yes and Catherine Marshall Marshall's wife also knows that he's going to say yes because he has a sense of duty and she is furious at Truman for asking this in the first place but for Truman China at this moment represents a gigantic problem that really threatens his whole vision of what the post-war order is supposed to look like through World War two and into the immediate aftermath of the war the United States had talked about the big four powers that were going to keep the peace in the post-war world so you had the United States the United Kingdom the Soviet Union and China that were supposed to together serve as the the four policemen they were four of the five original signatories the United Nations shortly before the story begins and that was how the the peace was going to was going to hold that's how the post-war order was really going to be sustained the problem was that China at this moment doesn't really look like a modern great power it looks like a failed state you have a central government led by John Guy Shuck the the nationalist leader who was establishing sort of tenuous control over Chinese territory after the Japanese have been defeated but Mao and the communists are challenging him for control and this is at a time when the communist menace is starting to catch people's attention in Washington so the combination of this civil war that threatens our vision of what China is supposed to be in the sense that there might be a communist threat in China really presents this problem for Truman so he with regret looks to the man who has probably done more than anyone else in the country to win the war to now go save the peace and that's that's why he makes this call his charge to Marshall is to go to China for a couple months he says he thinks it'll be a quick quick mission and then Marshall can go back to retirement he should go to China he should broker a peace in the civil war he should lay the groundwork for a US allied Chinese democracy that will play the role we expected to and then he can go off and do his retirement that he's been planning the mission instead of lasting two months ends up lasting 13 months and rather than Marshall retiring in short order he starts what is really the kind of most important and acclaimed phase of his career he goes on from this mission to become Secretary of State to the Marshall plan and then to become Secretary of Defense a few years later during Korea and to his wife's dismay and anger at Truman it's six years before he actually resires so when he sees taking this on he thinks it's going to be a relatively brief last pit stop if you will before he can get on to his retirement does he share Truman's vision of the importance of the mission I mean this idea of the world policeman I mean is he on that page and and talk a little bit about how as he sets off on this the weight of that sets on him as he's realizing he's got to go out and accomplish this rather daunting task in fairly short order so Truman is not particularly steeped in the complexities of the situation in China he's not particularly aware of the history there are kind of these amazing quotes from recess now I don't really know what's going on over there in China but I know Marshall can go fix it and that's that's kind of where Truman is Marshall has a little bit more depth he's lived he lived in China in the 1920s as a as an army officer he had through the war dealt with the very complicated relationship between the Americans and the Chinese government he'd seen the difficulties of the the two sides and was aware that they'd been in a civil war on and off for 20 years at this point but he understood this one world vision that had really sustained the US through the war and he saw why this was important which is part of why he took it on knowing that it was going to be such a such a difficult task you talk about Truman sort of not appreciating the nuances of China but figuring Marshall can do it and there's this kind of mythology that's already you know encapsulated Marshall in his own time of he can almost he can accomplish anything he can did he have a sense of the way people saw him I mean in this sort of the great man status that he had and if so you know how did he deal with that so what was what was really fascinating to me having a sense of Marshall the myth and having a sense of the way we think of Marshall now was that in digging into this it turns out that a lot of what we the way we think about Marshall but also the way people thought about Marshall at the time really is wrong there's a kind of image that he constructed over the course of his life that really was there to serve his own ends and that concealed what I think is a much more complex and and in some ways more interesting man than the Marshall the myth that we think of now I love a line that I came across from an officer in new and who said Marshall is the greatest actor in the army everyone thinks that MacArthur Douglas MacArthur is the greatest actor but it's actually Marshall because with Marshall you never know he's acting and that really did capture something something about this figure he had created this image of the great stoic that people really bought into Margaret MacArthur was this kind of theatrical blustering narcissistic figure FDR called him the one of the two most dangerous men in America along with Huey Long and Marshall was this kind of commanding self-contained stoic character but that was something that Marshall had really created you know he ultimately at this point had risen to the highest ranks of the of the US Army but when you go back to earlier in his career even into his mid-thirties he was rising so slowly in the ranks that he thought he was gonna have to quit and you know at the time he was this it was kind of a mess actually he was had a terrible temper he cursed constantly he smoked all the time and he ended up having two nervous breakdowns hospitalizations were nervous exhaustion as they said at the time when he was in its early thirties and it was at that point when he saw that he was gonna have to construct a different kind of persona that could withstand pressure in a new way and so that's where you get the kind of stoic Marshall that he is at this point and that really was what people around him saw also you you read accounts from some of the most kind of commanding figures of the moment and they go into sort of giddy raptures when talking about about Marshall and they especially go into this idea of his kind of authority in the sense of comedy spreads in a room when as soon as he enters it but that was not the Marshall that you know you would have seen 20 years earlier I think most Americans obviously know Marshall from the Marshall plan right name for him in Europe in the post World War two recovery and really creating a model for what American foreign policy would be for the remainder of this entry and an idea about how we should act as a great power but then there is this question that you know is at the heart of the book of who lost China right and it is something that has its most immediate resonance in the 1950s and starts echoing and taking on even new iterations you might even argue into the present moment we'll talk about that so this is this is a period in Marshall's life that maybe Marshall would even want to forget right it is in some respects a blemish maybe a failure a very complicated story and there's a there's almost kind of a redemptive quality I sense and you're approaching this narrative of wanting to kind of go back and really examine this and try to answer the question and we will kind of get at that as we go but but talk about why you wanted to write about Marshall in this period as opposed to his more you know illustrious career right so this book is really born of my experience going into government and being working in the policy planning staff which to skip ahead as a bit is an office that Marshall created when he was Secretary of State and hearing a lot about the myth of Marshall who is this kind of totemic figure in American foreign policy and military circles but looking more closely to his career you know we hear so much about the Marshall plan and when you work in the policy planning staff that which was part of the creation of the Marshall plan it's this constant reference point and you hear outside commentators who constantly call on you to create a new Marshall plan for every problem so you know when I was there there'd be calls for a Marshall plan for Central America or Southeast Asia Marshall plan for the Middle East Marshall plan for Middle America we hear now you hear about that all the time in studying American foreign policy but when I looked at Marshall in this period this was to him an equally important part of the story and it was the part that was not told in part because it's seen as this blemish but as Marshall lived in his Marshall thought about the post-war world and his own contribution to American strategy in that period this to him was equally critical yeah one of the things I love about the story is that in kind of bringing him to life you you pretty quickly dispense with a lot of the you know the mythologies in the greatness not dispense with you kind of get that out of the way in the beginning of the book and then really try and dive into like what made him tick and there's this this notion of Marshall as a logistician as the supreme nuts and bolts details guy that you know the kind of person who would be as wonderfully at home in the bureaucracy and in all of the sort of the depths of things understanding of things work and talk about that because that when we think about I think often you know sort of figures of this kind of level of stature and greatness we almost think oh they're born with it or it's effortless this was somebody who just obsessed and spent an incredible amount of time thinking a literally about how people move around and how you move equipment from one place to the next and rail lines and shipping lines and yeah obviously he brought that to the war effort and you can talk about that too but like the kind of focus a little bit for us on this this the mind of this logistician now going to be this diplomat so Marshall during has served in France and World War one army chief of staffer in World War two and as you read his interactions with the other great figures of the time what is amazing is how often he comes back to the question of how something is going to get done so you have these you know discussions of grand strategy and objectives and Marshall's always the one saying do we have enough shipping capacity for that do we have how are we going to supply troops if they go to to this front or that front and he always comes back to these very kind of what are seen at times tedious questions of how and that is what he takes in to his career as a statesman you know it's easy for diplomats to talk about objectives without thinking about means to talk about ends without thinking about means and Marshall is very very rigorous in his insistence that people think about means and as he goes into this mission it's what he presses President Truman his boss who's given him this charge to think about it's one of the more there's this exhaustive and you chronicle it really well though it's not exhausting I should say in the narrative it's quite compelling and it moves along but this this effort that he's making to try and get the nationalists and the communists to come to agreement and you know and quite literally put the terms down on paper and agree to them and you can almost see him trying to just work it out like it's an equation and it in and you know ultimately you reveal this in the book too but they're not thinking even in the same way and with the same worldview as he is I mean talk about the frustrations that he faced and just trying to sort of make them conform in some way to his idea of how the piece was supposed to work right so first I want to go back to them the moment when it seems when he first gets there so he he gets this charge from Truman he flies to Chongqing which had been the wartime Chinese capital it is a country that's been under Japanese occupation for you know various parts of it for more than a decade eight years of full occupation or almost full occupation and the toll of that is just staggering so the you know so many 20 million people have died 80 million people displaced railways are destroyed roads are destroyed so he's really arriving in this really sort of war ruined land and he gets there and because of who he is he throws himself into this mission with the kind of commitment that he brought to the war effort and he he writes his letters home telling his wife and friends that he is working as he as hard as he had been during the war which is quite a statement given what he was contending with as army chief of staff during World War two and he remarkably quickly seems to get these agreements he gets an agreement between the nationals and communists to to stop fighting he gets an agreement between them to merge their gigantic armies that have been at war on and off for 20 years and he in some ways most remarkably given where history ended up gets them to accept what is essentially a kind of democratic constitution for China he drafts a bill of rights and hands it to Chiang Kai-shek and says this should be the the basis for a constitution and he gets the two sides to agree to go into a government together and there's this kind of amazing moment when you see even Marshall really swept up in this vision of what of what China can be he's a pretty hard-headed character as he goes he's under no illusions about the difficulty of what he's contending with but as he starts to get these agreements you see him really get caught up in this kind of democratic evangelizing fervor which is very very American but had not been part of Marshall's DNA up to that point and so he you know you see him reading Benjamin Franklin speeches to these kind of Chinese who must have been just sort of confused why he was doing it you see him at one point having a conversation with the director Frank Capra who's about to start filming it's a wonderful life and and Marshall asks him to produce a series of short films to teach the Chinese people how to be Democrats which sounds like some of the kind of worst caricatures of US policy and you know Iraq in the spring of 2003 you see him handing Chiang Kai-shek this this draft bill of rights and saying to him this is just a good dose of American medicine that the Chinese need and Marshall thinks that the Chinese are kind of amused by that statement but you can read the accounts from the other side and they're of course totally furious by the presumption of it so there is this moment when this vision doesn't seem quite so fanciful and it's it's not just Marshall it's people kind of across the political spectrum in the United States who all of a sudden think that Marshall has kind of saved the situation and that's true of people who will later become you know McCarthyite critics it's true of President Truman it's true of you know the most prominent columnist of the time who write these kind of triumphant accounts of what of what he's managed to achieve and it's right as he it seems to be at this moment of triumph that the world starts to change around them right and there's this when you get through the first third of the book and it seems like wow this is gonna be easy and he you know he leaves to go back to Washington for a period and it seems as just as quickly as he leaves it all starts to fall apart again and one of the things that you play with this idea in the book is you know his presence every all the sides kept saying if only you would come back if you would be here and there's this sort of sense of Marshall as the indispensable ingredient that could make all of this work and for then he comes back but it doesn't all work and it is an extraordinary frustrating for him and as the reader to you're getting this sense of wait a minute this we had an agreement we had a plan so talk a little bit about like just what happened I mean because it it just almost inexplicably starts to unravel so I think in our historical memory we tend to think of world or two ending and then the Cold War kind of starting immediately but there is this really interesting period after the war when people are really trying to figure out what's going on and there's this one world vision from the war that people are still trying trying to salvage they're trying to salvage this notion that there will be a cooperative approach to the peace there are still summits between Stalin and the Americans that are attempting to salvage that vision and at the beginning China is seen as grounds for cooperation so Stalin is telling now look you can't win I don't want trouble you really need to cooperate with Marshall the Americans are telling the Nationalists in China you've really got to cooperate as the months go on we start to see the first signs of the Cold War what becomes the Cold War so right as Marshall is at what seems to be the pinnacle of success he goes on this tour of China and he spends several days going to all these places that had been war-torn for years and years and going and kind of sitting down with commanders from both sides and working out a piece kind of location by location and in the kind of culminating stop he goes to Yunnan which has been the desolate communist headquarters for almost a decade it's where the Long March ended and it's this incredibly barren remote place kind of guarded by ravines where the communists have been living in these caves that are dug out of the mountains and Marshall lands there and meets now and has this 24-hour visit with the communist leadership that it's kind of incredibly eerie and bizarre in retrospect as you see them sitting there kind of talking about this future of peace and friendship and you see the communists giving orders to you know kind of sincere orders for this moment to their followers to start pursuing their goals politically you know they've not given up on the idea of revolution but it's seen as a political path at this point you see communist leaders talking about what roles they're going to have in a government led by by John Kaishak and now with Marshall talks about you know the communist embrace of US style democracy and free enterprise and now is talking about how eerie is to visit the US and learn from the American experience but right as this is happening the same day that Marshall is in in Yunnan having these conversations the communists are also watching a visit to the United States by Winston Churchill and on this same day Churchill goes to Fulton Missouri where he gives what becomes a very very famous speech talking about the iron curtain falling between the West and the communist worlds and the iron curtain that Churchill talks about is in Europe at the time but the the communists in China see this Stalin sees this John Kaishak sees this and they all realize that the one world vision is starting to come apart and there is a very different world started to take shape and that's really when Marshall starts to struggle yeah and you can you can feel in the book how quickly things start changing I mean day by day week by week and he has a real sense of that too and you're right that people at the time say if only Marshall came back right he could start he goes to he goes to Washington to get a gigantic aid package for this new unified China's good or Marshall plan for China and as he's doing that he's lobbying Congress for support things start to fall apart and everyone says bring Marshall back he'll fix it and he comes back but it's not as easy as he thinks right and he keeps using the threat of him leaving again as the sort of the stick to try to bring bring people right right back to the table and you know and really I mean in very dramatic fashion sort of waits really called quite the last minute to sort of give the final ultimatum of you know either you do it you know you stick to the agreements are I'm leaving there's this wonderful scene I'll have you recount it with Joe Enlai who is on the the main communist center locator in this where he surprises him at a meeting but tell the story it's so illustrative but also the theatrical qualities that Marshall had so Joe Enlai is this you know really fascinating figure he's one of Mao's lieutenants and is really the kind of chief diplomat for the for the Communist Party but he's this figure who is really skilled at dealing with Westerners especially he's a great strategist and political strategist but he really knows how to sit down with Americans with Europeans and reflect back the expectations that that they want from him and he and Marshall establish a very very good working relationship at first as the Communists are are negotiating and want to show that they're negotiating a good faith or at least appear to be but that starts to unravel and and Marshall's really confused by what's happened and as the Communists start to attack him he keeps going back to China saying I don't understand why you're doing this we seem to be going so well and so all of a sudden Joe just stops talking to him he flees Nanjing where the mission is moved when the capital moves and he's gone to to Shanghai and he refuses to come back and talk to Marshall so Marshall gets on a plane and secretly leaves Nanjing flies to Shanghai and has a local general invite Joe over for lunch at his house and Marshall hides behind a screen and when Joe appears in the room Marshall kind of springs out from behind behind the screen and and terrifies Joe and I and tries to get him to come back and it was just you know you see the case after case where Marshall goes these kind of bizarre lengths just thinking if he can get the two sides back in a room he can get back to to where he was into this kind of hopeful hopeful vision that he had early on and then these kind of wonderful moments because he's he's he's swallowing his pride in so many of these moments and is almost desperate to do anything that he can right to get them back together including you know pulling off sort of a surprise is it like this they're all there are lighter moments throughout the book too and many of them come through in the relationship that Marshall and his wife Catherine Marshall who joins him for a significant part of this towards towards the end have with a John Kaishak and his wife Madame Chang so talk about these sort of like fascinating stories of cocktail parties and parties that they would throw and she of course you'll talk with her was this outsized figure you know famous in the West I mean revered one of the most revered women I think in the world probably at the time and there these kind of omissions these kind of magical moments where they're going to parties and they're having birthdays and they're having wonderful lunches and there's a real warmth that develops between these people that makes you stop thinking of them as you know not as quite adversaries but as combatants in this so but talk about some of the social interactions and the one that develops between these two families so to go back to your one of your first questions you know one of the things that is lost in some of the history we tell about about foreign policies this human element and it's something that you feel or I felt very acutely when I went it when I was in government and you see just how much of what happens day-to-day is driven by personal relationships and bureaucratic dynamics and it's it tends to get sort of flattened out in in the history that we tell about it but in the moment it's very very critical to understanding the kind of path of events and there's there are moments in this book where if you look at it in retrospect kind of leaving out those personal dimensions it seems inexplicable especially when Marshall comes back as things are falling apart he brings Catherine Marshall's wife with him and as things start to go bad in the diplomatic relationship Catherine Marshall establishes this very very close relationship with with with Madame Zhang and and John Keshek as well and this is in part strategic on their part they're very very smart both sides are very smart about how they build relationships with the Americans but there does form a real friendship between Catherine and Madame Zhang so there's a moment in the summer when Nanjing it's extremely hot and Zhang's go to their summer retreat which is in this place in the mountains called called cooling it was built by Europeans in the kind of height of the imperial presence in China so it is these kind of stone bungalows that look like they're in the Alps or something you kind of go up there and you feel like you're in Switzerland and they're kind of you know pine trees and in Brooks and these you know Episcopalian churches built of stone so Catherine goes with them as Civil War is kind of spreading in the lowlands she's sick of living in a house with her husband's aides it's extremely hot and unpleasant and in Nanjing she goes up into the mountains and brings with her a game called Chinese checkers which is not a Chinese game it is a Western game but she she brings it with her for some reason and teaches the Zhangs how to play Chinese checkers and that generally Simeo especially becomes obsessed with this game so you read these accounts of officers kind of coming up from this escalating civil war which is going to have these world historical consequences expecting to have these grueling conversations about strategy and instead they're all playing Chinese checkers at a table together and and Marshall because he wants to go see his wife keeps coming up going up the mountain again and again and it's being carried up right it's it's this it takes five forms of transportation and like eight hours to get from Nanjing to the house where Catherine is and you see him kind of going up the mountain again and again and again he's carried in a sedan chair 3,500 feet up Dean Atchison who's back in Washington calls him Sisyphus at this point because he just keeps going up and down the mountain as things don't seem to be changing at all and you look at what Marshall is doing you say this doesn't make any sense but he's just he's there to see his wife and he says at some point if it weren't for the friendship that she'd established with with the drawings the diplomatic relationship would have broken down entirely but because there's this quality of kind of couples having cocktails and playing croquet together he kind of keeps at it through this it seems like particularly when Catherine shows up it starts to create the space in between which people can breathe right between these moments of huge tension and high drama and these kind of where you can begin to sort of live a life and obviously people are getting to know each other and that's that's really compelling to in the book he he and Catherine was not his first wife his first wife was quite ill and passed away he had a very sickly first wife who died shortly after they were in China the first time right and they married when they were in their late 40s right so talk about the a little bit about the role that you know Catherine plays you've you've talked a bit about here in this period but to what she was like as a force in his life and and through the war as well she was she was this very formidable personality and run right she had been an actress in her youth and had three kids and really kind of made Marshall into a family man but you read the accounts from the time of his his aides especially who talk about him just kind of softening when she's there so he's this you know very very tough figure but the minute she's in the house and is at the kind of table with them there's just this immediate change in the man yeah and he really mean one of the other great tensions in the book is he keeps trying to get back to Leesburg and to get back to retirement right and to be there with his wife and working in the garden right and I mean and she's in many ways kind of the embodiment of that I mean but her being there at the same time it you know it strengthened him it gave him some sense of home it must have right right and and it you know I there's no there's no record of this he's a kind of reticent character didn't keep a diary but you assume that he went back and said her look I'll bring I'll bring you back with me to try to alleviate some of her anger and she says it he will never say you know I'm bitter about having to be here but she will say on his behalf I can't believe we're still here I can't believe they're doing this to George right right and she was obviously angry at Truman for calling him in the first place that's right so you just alluded to this now but Marshall didn't write a memoir despite publishers offering him huge sums of money to do it he didn't do it he declined even to keep detailed personal records during the war which I found kind of just stunning right talk about why he made these decisions and then I want you to talk a little bit about the challenge that that posed for you writing this book when your protagonist not only didn't leave much of a record but refused to create much of it so Marshall I think rightly looked around at his colleagues and fellow officers and fellow diplomats who were writing keeping diaries or writing memoirs and said this is this entirely self-serving you are trying to craft the historical record in a way that will reflect well upon you Winston Churchill said this most famously history will be kind to me for I intend to write it Marshall would say if I think about what history is going to say about me even if it's just in keeping a diary that people will read later I'm going to screw things up now because I'm going to be doing it with with that in mind I realized those two boats to open the book that's right so the epigraph is the Churchill quote in the line for Marshall responding to someone a historian who's saying you've got to keep a diary for the future he he knew it would be self-serving so it creates a challenge for someone trying to understand what Marshall thought on the one hand but ultimately I came to see it as an advantage and that there's no Marshall was not trying to craft this story in real time he was leaving that to others to do and what made it possible to write this book and gave it a kind of I think narrative richness that that was very important to me you know you have people sitting in meetings with him all the time so you have contemporaneous real-time notes and much of what they're saying but most importantly and this is probably not a surprise to anyone who has ever worked as an aid or assistant to anyone in any any field it's the the kind of young aids around Marshall who really tell you what's going on and there are two in particular who were you know kind of amazing characters in their own right and very very different one is this kind of young earnest square-jawed officer John Hart Cahey who keeps a diary reveres Marshall and also writes these kind of letters gushy letters back to his wife in South Carolina talks about you know his fear that there'll be a World War three that his daughters will get caught up but caught up in someday and then there's another character a kind of a cervix cynical young diplomat named John Melby who also keeps a diary has a much more jaundice take on what's going on but also writes these letters back to a woman with whom he's having an affair named Lillian Hellman who's this very famous playwright and screenwriter in the US and a kind of famous figure of the time and he's writing these sort of pornographic letters to her that will start out with these almost like late-night text you know I miss you and why aren't you writing me more messages and then he'll spend pages describing you know not just what happened in the meeting that day but what the gossip was at parties and what Marshall's mood was and what the weather was like and what they were drinking and you get this kind of full picture of the story you know the official documents and the you know you could go to National Archives and read the intelligence documents and the transcripts of meetings but that gives you part of the story but kind of understanding what they said when they were you know having drinks on the terrace afterwards or you know he would go to parties at the at Communist headquarters in Chongqing and on Jing and report back to his mistress what was said and that provides us just kind of narrative quality to it that you know I think allows you to see a different dimension of it makes me think to be the this is not an original thought but the lack of letter writing today ends up not having that kind of rich record so I wonder now what it's going to be like when people 50 years looking back trying to write about this period what we're going to rely on although be deciphering your your actual text messages that's true and you're and we'll have tweets so that that'll be great you know you're capturing something too in this in this idea of Marshall not wanting to keep a journal and and not thinking about how history is going to remember me it's almost like he's sort of he's not thinking about the future he's trying to live in the moment but he was also this incredibly ambitious person who as you said I mean it you know really kind of drove him to the brink in his early 30s that he hadn't achieved something great I mean so but but he seems to be like somebody who truly was you know practicing mindfulness he really was in the moment at all of these times and that comes across and one of the things that he starts doing when he's in his 30s and has these hospitalized for these these kind of breakdowns I want he collapses in the street at one point from exhaustion from from pressure as he starts deciding he's gonna as he says relax completely every day so he takes a nap for you know he takes like a power nap in the afternoon he watches movies in the evening so you have these kind of again very eerie scenes where these world historical figures are sitting there watching movies and eating ice cream together and sometimes they're watching you know documentaries about concentration camps other times they're watching Tarzan movies and having these kind of incredibly important conversations on the side but that was also central to the way he approached problems and whatever he was doing he was doing it full on with his full attention you know obviously one of the big questions and not only in this book but you know in history of US foreign policy is this question of who lost China and I do think that in the book you are trying to answer that question I certainly came away from the book thinking it sure as hell wasn't George Marshall who lost China which is and I think you are in many ways you might let you respond to this but I think that you are in some sense trying to this book is very much a rejoinder to those people who were I mean blaming Marshall for this is for this kind of calamity yeah so let me let me skip ahead a bit because I think we forget now just how big a question and force in American politics this the who lost China question was you know skipping Marshall Marshall ends his mission in January 1947 immediately becomes Secretary of State rather than retiring Truman comes to see him as this kind of diplomatic figure in this period a couple years later in 1949 now wins which Marshall kind of starts to think will happen over time but as soon as that as soon as that does happen there is a tremendous political backlash in the US and starting really in that moment but especially in the 1950s the question of why America that seemed to have be so close to achieving something else in China hadn't managed to do it and why the Communists had won became a source of kind of incredible recrimination and charges of betrayal and weakness at the time and Marshall was really at the center of this so there's a you know famous line from Joseph McCarthy in 1950 I believe a conspiracy he talks about a conspiracy so immense and infamy so black this kind of communist plot to destroy American leadership that was delivered in a three-hour speech about George Marshall an attack on you know this figure who was one of the most prominent military and diplomatic figures of the time was essentially being denounced as a traitor or at least kind of communist frontman on the floor of the US Congress and it was such a powerful force in US politics that a couple of years later in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower was running for president he didn't defend Marshall and Eisenhower had been created by Marshall he was a junior officer a relative junior officer who was plucked out by Marshall during the war and given battlefield command Marshall supported him taking over the D-Day command ultimately his whole career was owed to Marshall and as he's running for president he shows up in Wisconsin where Joseph McCarthy is from and gets on stage with McCarthy and had originally planned to defend Marshall his mentor this guy looks like as a father and ultimately decides that it's too politically costly to defend the man who had made his career so you know Eisenhower has this moment of betrayal which he feels very guilty about in the tones for but it was kind of an indication to me of just how powerful that force was yeah I mean you pointed in beginning the book that it was at least for a time contemplated that Marshall would go lead the D-Day invasion but FDR decided in the end that he wouldn't be able to sleep through the night he was out of Washington and Marshall would not lobby for it right right so if but for that it would have been Marshall remembered as the hero of D-Day but you know he you get it something in the book that that was so kind of captures in a way of Marshall's whole approach to this in this in this issue of who lost China which is sort of presumes that it could be saved in the first place and then we can what does that even mean who's to save but you know he wrote that he believed that neither the Communists could destroy the Nationalists nor the other way around but between them they could destroy China and he really had a sense of the costs of this that they for the people who were there it wasn't just American foreign policy it was the fate of this whole country yeah these and when in these moments when he seems to be kind of battling against these increasingly long odds he says again and again I would quit if it weren't for the the human costs of this but what he takes away from that he really kind of comes away with two lessons that shaped the way he approaches the next stage of his career he on the one hand becomes very very skeptical of the ability of American power to change the dynamics in China without really fundamental changes on the ground especially by the Nationalist leadership he is not he does not see John Kaishak as a villain as many did at the time but season was all the sort of tragic figure who cannot do what really needs to be done to change the dynamics so as there are proposed in the United States to do the kinds of things in China that we would do in Vietnam say 15 years later to put in 10,000 advisors or to give there's a proposal to give Douglas MacArthur control of nationalist armies in the late 1940s and Marshall is really a skeptic who argues against that kind of intervention before the communist victory but he also takes this sense of how power works and the importance of everyday problems to US foreign policy and that informs his approach to Europe so he becomes Secretary of State and looks across a whole whole world where he's contending with the kinds of problems that he dealt with in China and where is this the sense of Soviet power and collapsing societies and it's a lot of the things that he was saying to the Nationalists in China in the fall of 1946 that he then says in his famous speech at Harvard about the Marshall Plan a few months later so he makes this decision that it's with the Marshall Plan in Europe where in US investments really gonna pay off but the sense of the importance of diplomacy the kind of humanitarian goals addressing hunger and job prospects really has to be at the center of the US approach. And you have to be all in for it too. Right. So it makes me think that he and Colin Powell have had a lot in common. Yeah, I think that's right. He really, it goes back to the question you asked about the focus on means and logistics. He wants to really look at where resources are going to are going to pay off where investments going to pay off and that means deciding what not to do as well as what to do. I want to ask one last question before we turn to the audience for Q&A and for discussion to kind of bring it into the present moment at the end of the book in your assessment you write that Marshall like most Americans never fully grasped the negative capability that Chinese the Chinese brought and continue to bring to diplomacy and he didn't seem to quite reconcile with this notion of clashing notions of power that were in the end irreconcilable and in some ways I think the question of who lost China years some ways answering it saying you know maybe it was unwinnable but but talk about I mean what what are the lessons that we should be drawing now especially about China at a time when you know the relationship has always been complicated but now you have Xi Jinping the the law has been changed in China that he can serve for as long as he's alive. There's really been no Chinese leader with this level of authority and power since Mao. Right. So are we any better at understanding China's negative capability in its world view today. So we're at this moment in Washington especially of collective dismay with as we see it the failure of China to evolve the way we expect it to and that I think reflects a pattern that really begins with this mission in some ways but also is lived by Marshall in the course of both this period and in the aftermath and what happens in the kind of who lost China debate. So you see what is essentially this cycle that begins with American projection of hopes and expectations and desires on to Chinese realities and this kind of expectation that it will conform to our sense of how progress goes and you see it with Marshall in that early period but even later you will see Marshall and many others say look Democrats and Republicans have a different view of how things go so why can't the nationals and communists or you know they'll compare the Chinese war to the war and say you know northerners and southerners eventually figured out how to get along so what why can't you and there they have a very hard time kind of understanding the depth of that clash between different visions. The second stage of Marshall's mission the kind of second stage of that cycle is this you know clinging to that wishful thinking even as the evidence against it starts to accumulate when reality starts to show otherwise and that's you know Marshall I think like like people now have a hard time giving up that vision even as reality starts to reflect something else and then the third stage is this you know the backlash and this fear of recrimination and charges of betrayal that really continues for a long time and has this long overhang in American foreign policy in the Cold War but in some ways is where we are now we're kind of in another who lost China moment and to Marshall that in some ways the backlash ends up being as destructive as the wishful thinking so what are some of the lessons we should be drawing from you know his successes and his failures as we think about the US China relationship so I mean I think to the negative capability point he gets so taken up by the success of that first period that when when Chinese diplomacy starts to change and this is on both the nationals to communist side he's very very slow to recognize that he doesn't recognize that while they both sides are kind of sticking to the same goal they have made a decision about a new approach to it and I think that is something that continues to this day in the US China relationship the second lesson for Marshall is that the the backlash and what you do afterwards what you do after that wishful thinking collapses you can make the wrong choices in the right choice then the right choices and if you make the wrong choices that can have its own kind of second-order effects okay I welcome now questions from the audience for Dan about the book and George Marshall and and China so please don't be shy yeah okay one default on Shane said it's I love the both the both with the context the modern context and then context is what as Shane put it like who owns two lost China such a hilarious removal of agency from the Chinese right right it's just like a notion that we still say nowadays but it still seems really strange in the post imperial world that there is something we could have done right but a different much more prosic contextual question is modern media environment and the media environment in the 40s right just as a as a member of the media who studies it just as much as I do what would that have been like then or could something like that happen now the idea of the media not commenting on the top of the mountain Chinese games what that meant just seems hilarious to me I wonder whether that has any reflection on the ability to do great things now so it's a really interesting question the the media environment was more similar at that point than I would have expected to be you have this kind of incredible array of correspondents who are in China many of them who are the kids in missionaries who have been there through the war John Hersey is a young correspondent at the time who's about to become very famous he's about to go to Hiroshima with his assignment from the New Yorker to write what becomes one of the most kind of famous pieces of journalism of the 20th century but he's this young reporter who's was born in China is kicking around China meets with Marshall all the time writes dispatches for the New Yorker Teddy White is a young correspondent from time who's about to write a book called Thunder out of China which is very much a kind of anti-nationalist account but he is kicking around and you have this kind of orbit of journalists around Marshall who are trying to figure out what's going on and he actually had a couple points recruits journalists he recruits a journalist in the New York Times who's still being paid by the New York Times to serve on his staff which is kind of an amazing would be a huge scandal today but he writes a letter to Arthur Salzburger one of the one of the Arthur Salzburgers who's the publisher of the New York Times the time and asks him if he can borrow this correspondent to help them write reports and say you have this New York Times correspondent coming on board what also felt very familiar in watching the the coverage of this is a lot of a lot of journalists getting kind of caught up in this sense of optimism and then disavowing it later and kind of asking this question of how could anyone have thought that that was possible at the time but when you read the contemporaneous accounts whether it's of kind of young correspondents or of Henry Lewis who created Time Magazine and was a became a kind of key figure in the China lobby kind of real critic of Marshall and the who lost trying to debate at the time is writing Marshall saying you're doing great thank you so much for what you've managed to do he would also show up in China and get these secret briefings from from the nationalists and Henry Lewis would and would say to Marshall they gave me the secret the secret plans and they're about to win and Marshall says look you're getting taken for a ride by these guys which again I think that happens in war coverage now as well ma'am what role did Britain play at this time also there were Brits and Canadians and Australians who died in Southeast Asia during the during the Second World War and Burma and such and and I was wondering also what role did Marshall play at all in the development of Taiwan and could you elaborate on that sure it's a really interesting thread in this Britain had fought to preserve its imperial interest in China through the war and FDR and Churchill had had these gigantic fights about whether British imperial stake would kind of survive in the post-war and Churchill finally managed to preserve Hong Kong he said I'll give up Hong Kong over my dead body you'll take Hong Kong away from us over my dead body but otherwise because of the pressure from from Roosevelt much of the kind of British imperial interest had been given back to to the Chinese and back to John Keishek government at this point but there are all these figures these kind of British figures who have been around who are in these cities that are really kind of strikingly international at the time so when you read accounts of Shanghai or even Chongqing or Nanjing there's just this amazing array of Russians and British and and you know other Europeans and Americans who have been there for a long time all with kind of different stakes and visions of how things will play out in all kind of you know vying for Marshall's ear vying for his attention trying to you know sell him on one or another view of how things should proceed as for Taiwan it's really kind of in the latter stages of this book that the nationalists start to think about what it might mean if things go wrong so in October of 1946 October of November John Keishek pays his first visit to Taiwan and registers its value as a as a as a retreat if he needs it and it's the first kind of echoes or the first signs of that kind of thinking other questions for Dan sir yeah hi sounds very really interesting but I'm wondering was there any inkling in your research about North the Korean Peninsula because it wasn't too many years after this that it really blew up but was there any inkling that was going to blow up and was there any idea that there was any strategic value in the future for the Korean Peninsula it's it's another really interesting strand of the story the US at this point is there's so many problem Truman looks across the world looks across Asia there are so many places where there was a demand for US resources US troops and that includes public Korean Peninsula which we're occupying and where there is a kind of growing fight with the Soviets about what the future of the peninsula will be Marshall at this point is very very focused on China but you see American strategists starting to take stock of what it might mean if if the communist win and you can see the early signs of what would become domino theory at this point they can't quite figure out what the analogy is but you kind of see these figures saying well if you know if the communists went in China it's going to be like a great snowball of communism that's going to roll down the hill taking out the rest of Asia or there there's a one congressman starts talking about a baseball game of communism he says if they get to first base in in China they're gonna get a second base in Japan and third base in Africa and then they'll hit a home run in the United States and you kind of want to shake these guys and say you're looking for dominant like it's domino theory like domino is the analogy but you see that group that kind of thinking really starting to take shape and it's after Mao wins that Stalin finally says to to the North Koreans you can try to take North Korea and that also changes American thinking so the Korean war is in some ways one of the the consequences of this so the Soviets Stalin has a kind of shifting policy towards the Chinese communist at this point he is supportive of them and has a certain kind of relationship with Mao but at various points because he doesn't think Mao could win and because he's still kind of testing the boundaries of us Soviet cooperation withdraws support or tries to kind of restrain restrain the Chinese communists it's really as he sees them getting closer to victory that he that Soviet support really starts to increase and this is a part of a source of huge resentment on the part of Mao so when we get to the Sino-Soviet split which leads to Nixon's visit to China 25 years later which would be the between Marshall and Nixon there were no other senior Americans in that now so it really is kind of this this amazing this amazing gulf but when you get there when you get to Mao's break with the Soviets a big source of that is his feeling that Stalin wasn't really there for him during the revolution until it was clear that the Chinese communists were going to win any other questions sure yes sir you know the snowball of communism in your research there's I have not read about his relationship with MacArthur in Japan so did that anyway influence or impact it you know what what MacArthur was doing in Japan could either have some lessons or not lessons for his mission in China so so Marshall and MacArthur meet a couple of times during this mission Marshall would he stopped at least wants to see him on his way and on his way back to China the difference which they both understood was that we were occupying Japan and in China we were trying to coax an ally to behave in a different way and that is you know for anyone who deals in American foreign policy that's such a fundamental difference in what you're able to do so MacArthur could say this is this is the Japanese Constitution and he could kind of do it by by fiat but Marshall had to kind of try to coax John K. Shack into into adopting it so it was that difference between you know an occupied country where we can make decisions without much consultation and this much more complicated situation which becomes very familiar to American foreign policy through the Cold War into today you know how you deal with partners who may not see things the way the way we do is you know impart the story of a rocker Afghanistan right now and it's really Marshall kind of learning that lesson other questions sure good I would just be interested in in the research that you've done for this book and then how you're analyzing present-day or lessons for you know why you know why didn't read we read that China would not you know transition and transform into part of the world order I would be really intrigued in what you assess that Xi Jinping is thinking when it's when my impression is that transition to more of a ten-year term allowed China to to grow and develop more than it did under the control of Mao Zedong but now he's going back to being a Mao Zedong I just I'd be interested in your analysis yes I mean just to start with Marshall you know this is in some ways a story of chastened hopes right in the wishful thinking given up and this kind of an embrace of realism in the aftermath of it you know Marshall is in bodies probably more than anyone else in this period in this kind of time of the greatest generation era of the wise men he is really the embodiment of American strength and ambition and possibility and you see that in what he does the Secretary of State but the kind of acknowledgement of wishful thinking and accepting the consequences of that is just as much a part of that era and so remembering that those go together as I think one of the lessons for strategy today as for China directly again trying not to assume that we will change China's sense of its own interests but reacting to them as they are as I think the lesson that Marshall would take from this it's not it's hard to know what the direct analogy is and he was very very his the spirit of Marshall would condemn me if I tried to draw a direct analogy but the you know the thing he would always say is we have to kind of understand how they see their interests and react accordingly route rather than assuming that we can change them as we think they should be changed if there's no last questions I'm going to take moderators privilege and ask one final one which because I'm a journalist today covering this administration I'm constantly thinking about leadership and we're often thinking about the lack thereof and not just in the present administration but it seems like you know we we don't have great figures like this at least maybe we don't recognize them in our midst the way we have Marshall and I wonder and maybe it's an unfair question but do you give any thought to you know boy we sure could use somebody the likes of George Marshall again or are we romanticizing who he was and what he was capable of to think that if only a great man like that were around today it would solve so much of our problems so I come away with this from this with with high regard for Marshall and I roll my eyes at a lot of the contemporary figures who claim to be claimed to view Marshall as a role model while so flagrantly ignoring his example in many ways that said I think we do a disservice to ourselves by seeing these figures in this period in mythic terms the story this is a story of a failure it's a story of a failed mission and remembering that along with all of Marshall's great achievements and successes this was just as much a part of the story of at the time and you know the Eisenhower anecdote I shared before but Eisenhower not standing up for Marshall again is just a reminder that these were not perfect figures by any stretch of the imagination and just a quick post script that's an probably an appropriate place to end to the Eisenhower story you know Marshall liked to paint himself as this great stoic and that was very much his image at the time in history and he always claimed to not really care about that moment of betrayal by Eisenhower he would say you know politics is a dirty business you did what you had to do don't worry about it he would never express any any resentment at Eisenhower for not standing up for him with McCarthy in that moment but I found I came across a very touching exchange in the papers of one of Marshall's aides where Catherine Marshall writes this a letter and asks him to go to Eisenhower and push Eisenhower who's now present to say something nice about George and she didn't want her husband to know about this she wanted to be the secret request but she could evidently see that underneath the image of the great stoic there was an underlying hurt and that again is a reminder that even Marshall was not quite the figure that he wanted us to think he is well you've done a tremendous job drawing him as a as a full human being with all of his greatness and all of his flaws too and it's just a tremendous insight into Marshall and into history so congratulations thank you so much and thank you all for being here


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