America's Retreat from Victory - Joseph McCarthy




The Marshall-Acheson Strategy for the Future

The next appearance of Marshall in a position of supreme influence over our affairs came only in September of 1950. It was a black day for America when this Senate voted to set aside a law it had passed to guard against lesser calamities to allow Marshall to become Secretary of Defense. We were not on guard, we were not vigilant. We fell short on that day and I repentantly accept my share of the blame. I was recorded against the bill but opposition was hopeless because Marshall was still wearing the halo placed upon his head by the alchemy of liberal-leftist propaganda.

I wondered then why this venerable soldier, who had received the world's honors, who had served as the first man in the President's Cabinet, should be willing to return to the wars. I no longer wonder.

What is our strategy now?

It is to abandon American interest in the Far East, surrendering Formosa to the grasp of a United Nations strewn with our enemies and wanting nothing so much, under the leadership of the Socialists Government of Britain and the racist, totalitarian Government of India, as to thrust the United States out of the Far East.

It is because he differed with that policy that General MacArthur was recalled from the Far East. He stood as a barrier to the final fulfillment of the Marshall policy for China. That is why, when Marshall took office, Eisenhower was rushed to Europe and the great debate over the extent of our participation in the defense of Europe was provoked. That was the diversionary trick of a carnival prestidigitator. What had changed in Europe during last summer and early fall? What new sign was there that we faced attack from Russia in that quarter? The whole procedure was without meaning in any objective sense, yet it had meaning in the mind of the man referred to by the Democrats at Denver as "a master of global strategy."

Let us examine Marshall's strategy in Europe. Some feel that the problem of defending Europe can be settled merely by the decision whether we shall send an additional six or eight or ten American divisions to Western Europe. Would that it were that simple. The group which is doing the planning for Western Europe is the identical group which has been doing the disastrous planning for Asia; the same group that did the planning for the sellout of Poland and China.

When General Eisenhower appeared before the joint session of the Congress, he said he was unable to discuss the use of German manpower until the politics of the situation were cleared up by the diplomats. And for five years these diplomats have done nothing to clear up the situation. Periodically, our State Department has talked of rearming Western Germany to counter the powerful "peoples" army built up by the Russians in East Germany. We have had nothing but talk, apparently planned to lull the American people into a sense of security that we are going to do something in West Germany to counter the threat of Russia in East Germany.

When Eisenhower went to Europe to plan the defense of Western Europe, he was not even allowed to visit the greatest potential source of manpower for a Western European army—a country that has long been dedicated to fighting communism—Spain. I shall not argue that Spain has or has not the kind of government of which we approve. I am not going to argue that we should or should not love the 48,000,000 people of Western Germany. But it takes no argument, it follows as the night follows the day, that there is no way to defend the industrial heart of Europe unless we use those two great wells of tough anti-Communist manpower, Western Germany and Spain.

Why have we apparently adopted the suicidal strategy of opposing American and Allied flesh to the Russian on the undefended plains of central Europe? Are we inviting defeat there as well as in Asia? Why has our strategy, under Marshall, ignored the Mediterranean theater, as he scorned it in World War II; an area where we alone have potential bastions that can be held and from which we can launch counterattacks by air and land against Russia? Why have we slighted the two nations in Europe—one with an organized and effective army that is on our side; the other with a vast potential army. Spain has an organized army. The warlike quality of the Spanish is not challenged.

They have thirty-five divisions which they would throw into the pool. France has a half dozen at most, and who could rely completely on French conscripts in a war against the Communist motherland? The British have no more. Why have we slighted heroic Greece and the Turks, whose valor in Korea has won our respect and forged ties of gratitude which should last as long as this Republic itself?

We have embraced Yugoslavia. Dean Acheson has served notice upon the Kremlin that an attack upon Communist Yugoslavia will mean war with us. At whose bidding and by whose authority did Acheson speak—Acheson so meek in the Far East, so willing to surrender Formosa, to make peace on the thirty-eighth parallel and admit Communist China into the United Nations? Whose bidding was he following? Was it the British Socialist Government which, pursuing what Winston Churchill has called a sectarian and isolationist policy, has sought to strengthen all left-wing governments this side of the Iron Curtain and weaken all others? Was it the British Labor Party's desire for a socialized Europe that prompted Acheson to give his guaranty to Tito?

The policy of the United States with reference to the global pressures of Russia was ambiguous enough even before Marshall reentered the picture in September 1950. With Marshall again at Acheson's side, their captive President between them, there has been little doubt that we were treading the old path of appeasement of Russia.

Marshall's friends, the liberals of Yenan, shouldered their way into the war in Korea in December 1950. In January this Government agreed to the most abject poltroonery, the cease-fire offer to Peking, which, had it been accepted, would have resulted in our departure from Korea, the seating of the Chinese Reds in the United Nations, and placing the disposition of Formosa at the hazard of a commission weighted three to one against us. What saved us then I do not know.

Our escape was, however, only temporary.

After Marshall resumed his place as mayor of the palace in September 1950, with Acheson as captain of the palace guard and that weak, fitful, bad-tempered and usable Merovingian in their custody, the outlines of the defeat they meditated grew even plainer. The weakness of the United States in relation to the growing power of Soviet imperialism became clearer. And our weakness has become plain to the simplest citizen, the farthest removed from the seat of Government in Washington, and would have been evident even without the shameless doubts of the President that we could win a war with Russia and the self-satisfied revelations of our poor estate as a world power by Marshall and his palace men before the Russell Committee.

The feeling of America's weakness is in the very air we breathe in Washington. It derives not only from the moral debility of the highest echelons of the administration, from the flabbiness and lack of resolve upon the part of the palace guard and their minions. It comes from the objective facts of the situation.

During the summer of 1945 America stood at what Churchill described as the "highest pinnacle of her power and fame." The President and the man who was to be his Secretary of Defense commanded the greatest military instrumentality on land, sea and in the air that the world had ever seen. Our forces had fought victoriously on every continent except the American—in Africa, in Europe, in Asia, and above, on and over the seven seas. The Soviet empire, which would have fallen before the Nazis but for our assistance, was nursing its wounds, but glowering, self-confident and on the march from its own weakness. Britain had declined into the incompetent, self-righteous and doctrinaire hands of its Labor Party. Britain was economically prostrated, its empire was dwindling and was to dwindle further.

Only the United States among the great powers found its economic strength undiminished, its territories uninvaded and unswept by war, its full powers still unflexed. Everywhere America had friends, everywhere its power suggested friendship to others. In terms of the division of the world into spheres of interest, the United States, at the head of the coalition of the West, exercised friendly influence over nearly all the masses of the earth. The Soviet Union's own people and the few millions in the bordering satellites upon which it was already laying its hands constituted a small minority of the earth's peoples.

What do we find in the winter of 1951? The writs of Moscow run to lands which, with its own, number upward of 900 millions of people—a good forty percent of all men living. The fear of Russia or the subservience that power inspires inclines many hundreds of other millions, as in India, toward Moscow. The fear of Russia, plus other reasons, the chief of which is the supine and treacherous folly of our own policies, places other hundreds of millions in a twilight zone between the great poles of Moscow and Washington.

The United States stands today virtually alone as it faces its greatest trials. Where have we loyal allies? In Britain? I would not stake a shilling on the reliability of a Government which, while enjoying billions in American munificence, rushed to the recognition of the Chinese Red regime, traded exorbitantly with the enemy through Hong Kong and has sought to frustrate American interest in the Far East at every turn. Let us not blame our longtime friends, the British people. They have their Attlee and Morrison directing their foreign policy. We have our Marshall. We have our Acheson. Or perhaps I should say their Acheson.

What of Western Europe generally?

Have we a constant friend in that quarter? The Marshall Plan has mystified and alienated while it enriched them; the Marshall strategy, which threatens to turn Western Europe into another devastated Korea, has rightfully terrified them and encouraged among them a neutralism which sees the coming world struggle as one between two reeling giants, Russia and the United States, in which they seek to avoid a part.

In Europe we have snubbed our friends, the heroic Greeks and Turks and the thoroughly indoctrinated anti-Communists of Spain; and because of our servility toward Russia in Eastern Europe we have discouraged the gallant souls behind the Iron Curtain who might have waited upon our deliverance of them, as the peoples oppressed by the Nazis did, only to find themselves betrayed to an equal tyranny by our appeasement. What do we find in Asia? We reject the friendship of the Chinese of Formosa and the millions on the mainland struggling to be free of the monstrous usurpation that overwhelms them. The new Japan may be our friend but the governments of India, of Pakistan, of Burma, of Indonesia—all of which rose from and owe their existence to our defeat of the Japanese empire—belong to the league of those who want to deprive us of our strategical interests in the western Pacific.

The will to resist Russia here at home is vitiated. Gone is the zeal with which we marched forth in 1941 to crush the dictatorships. The leftist-liberals who preached a holy war against Hitler and Tojo are today seeking accommodation with the senior totalitarianism of Moscow. Is this because we are today arrayed against, to recall the phrase of General Bradley, "the wrong enemy" in the "wrong war"? We were on Russia's side in the last war—our strategy after the first Quebec conference might as well have been dictated in the Kremlin and teletyped to the Pentagon—and is that why the Marshall who prosecuted World War II with bloodthirsty zeal, eager to storm fortified shores, sat this one out?

The administration preached a gospel of fear and Acheson and Marshall expounded a foreign policy in the Far East of craven appeasement. The President threatens the American people with Russian-made atomic bombs. What is the purpose of such actions and utterances? Is it to condition us to defeat in the Far East, to soften us up so that we shall accept a peace upon the Soviet empire's terms in Korea; a peace which would put the enemy one step nearer to Alaska? And how did Russia acquire the technical secrets, the blueprints, the know-how to make the bombs with which the administration seeks to terrify us? I have yet to hear a single administration spokesman raise his voice against the policy of suppression, deceit, and false witness with which this administration has protected the Soviet agents who have abstracted those secrets from us.

The people, I am convinced, recognize the weakness with which the administration has replaced what was so recently our great strength. They are troubled by it. And they do not think it accidental. They do not believe that the decline in our strength from 1945 to 1951 just happened. They are coming to believe that it was brought about, step by step, by will and intention. They are beginning to believe that the surrender of China to Russia, the administration's indecently hasty desire to turn Formosa over to the enemy and arrive at a cease-fire in Korea instead of following the manly, American course prescribed by MacArthur, point to something more than ineptitude and folly. They witness the conviction of Hiss, which would not have happened had he not brought a private suit for damages against Whittaker Chambers; they follow the revelations in the Remington case, the Marzani case, and the others which have disclosed at the heart of Government active Soviet agents influencing policy and pilfering secrets; they note the policy of retreat before Soviet assertion from Yalta to this day, and they say: this is not because these men are incompetents, there is a deeper reason.

How can we account for Our present situation unless we believe that men high in this Government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.

Who constitutes the highest circles of this conspiracy? About that we cannot be sure. We are convinced that Dean Acheson, who steadfastly serves the interests of nations other than his own, who supported Alger Hiss in his hour of retribution, who contributed to his defense fund, must be high on the roster. The President? He is their captive. I have wondered, as have you, why he did not dispense with so great a liability as Acheson to his own and his party's interests. It is now clear to me. In the relationship of master and man, did you ever hear of a man firing master? President Truman is a satisfactory front. He is only dimly aware of what is going on.

It is when we return to an examination of General Marshall's record since the spring of 1942 that we approach an explanation of the carefully planned retreat from victory. Let us again review the Marshall record, as I have disclosed it from the sources available. This grim and solitary man it was who, early in World War II, determined to put his impress upon our global strategy, political and military.

It was Marshall who, amid the din for a "second front now" from every voice of Soviet inspiration, sought to compel the British to invade across the Channel in the fall of 1942 upon the penalty of our quitting the war in Europe.

It was Marshall who, after North Africa had been secured, took the strategic direction of the war out of Roosevelt's hands and who fought the British desire, shared by Mark Clark, to advance from Italy into the eastern plains of Europe ahead of the Russians.

It was a Marshall-sponsored memorandum, advising appeasement of Russia in Europe and the enticement of Russia into the Far Eastern war, circulated at Quebec, which foreshadowed our whole course at Teheran, at Yalta, and until now in the Far East.

It was Marshall who, at Teheran, made common cause with Stalin on the strategy of the war in Europe and marched side by side with him thereafter.

It was Marshall who enjoined his chief of military mission in Moscow under no circumstances to "irritate" the Russians by asking them questions about their forces, their weapons, and their plans, while at the same time opening our training schools, factories, and gradually our secrets to them.

It was Marshall who, as Hanson Baldwin asserts, himself referring only to the "military authorities," prevented us having a corridor to Berlin, So it was with the capture and occupation of Berlin and Prague ahead of the Russians.

It was Marshall who sent Deane to Moscow to collaborate with Harriman in drafting the terms of the wholly unnecessary bribe paid to Stalin at Yalta. It was Marshall who ignored the contrary advice of his senior, Admiral Leahy, of MacArthur and Nimitz; manipulated intelligence reports, brushed aside the potentials of the A-bomb, and finally induced Roosevelt to reinstate Russia in its pre-1904 imperialistic position in Manchuria; an act which, in effect, signed the death warrant of the Republic of China.

It was Marshall, with Acheson and Vincent assisting, who created the China policy which, destroying China, robbed us of a great and friendly ally, a buffer against the Soviet imperialism with which we are at war.

It was Marshall who went to China to execute the criminal folly of the disastrous Marshall mission.

It was Marshall who, upon returning from a diplomatic defeat for the United States at Moscow, besought the reinstatement of forty millions in lend-lease for Russia.

It was Marshall who for two years suppressed General Wedemeyer's report, which is a direct and comprehensive repudiation of the Marshall Policy.

It was Marshall who, disregarding Wedemeyer's advices on the urgent need for military supplies, the likelihood of China's defeat without ammunition and equipment, and our "moral obligation" to furnish them, proposed instead a relief bill bare of military support.

It was the State Department under Marshall, with the whole-hearted support of Michael Lee and Remington in the Commerce Department, that sabotaged the $125,000,000 military-aid bill to China in 1948.

It was Marshall who fixed the dividing line for Korea along the thirty-eighth parallel, a line historically chosen by Russia to mark its sphere of interest in Korea.

It was Marshall's strategy for Korea which turned that war into a pointless slaughter, reversing the dictum of Von Clausewitz and every military theorist after him that the object of war is not merely to kill but to impose your will on the enemy.

It is Marshall-Acheson strategy for Europe to build the defense of Europe around the Atlantic Pact nations, excluding the two great wells of anti-Communist manpower in Western Germany and Spain and spurning the organized armies of Greece and Turkey—another case of following the Lattimore advice of "let them fall but don't let it appear that we pushed them."

It was Marshall who, advocating timidity as a policy so as not to annoy the forces of Soviet imperialism in Asia, admittedly put a brake on the preparations to fight, rationalizing his reluctance on the ground that the people are fickle and, if war does not come, will hold him to account for excessive zeal.

If Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would have dictated that at least some of his decisions would have served this country's interest. Even if Marshall had been innocent of guilty intention, how could he have been trusted to guide the defense of this country further? We have declined so precipitously in relation to the Soviet Union in the last six years, how much swifter may be our fall into disaster with Marshall's policies continuing to guide us? Where will all this stop? This is not a rhetorical question; ours is not a rhetorical danger. Where next will Marshall's policies, continued by Acheson, carry us?

What is the objective of the conspiracy? I think it is clear from what has occurred and is now occurring: to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East and to impair our will to resist evil. To what end? To the end that we shall be contained and frustrated and finally fall victim to Soviet intrigue from within and Russian military might from without. Is that far-fetched? There have been many examples in history of rich and powerful states which have been corrupted from within, enfeebled and deceived until they were unable to resist aggression.