President Eisenhower's decision to remove the Seventh Fleet as defense for the Communist China mainland marked a complete repudiation of one of the strangest policies in the history of the U.S.: the Truman-Acheson policy of suppressing the Chinese Nationalist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek.
The Chinese Nationalists finished their withdrawal from the mainland across the 100-mile straits to Formosa in December 1949. (Four months earlier, Dean Acheson had tried to write off the Nationalists with the China white paper—an official attack on a friendly power without precedent in the history of international relations.)...
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