The questioning turned to recent history and past sores: the Administration's tragic postwar China policy, and General Marshall's part in it. Hadn't that "something to do with the present prejudice [in the Administration] against General MacArthur?" asked New Jersey's Republican Alexander Smith.
MARSHALL : "I don't think that had any connection with it whatsoever." Republicans Smith and Knowland were not satisfied. They wanted to hear all about Marshall's presidential mission to China in 1945-46. Had his orders been to help bring about a coalition between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalist government? asked Knowland. Said Marshall: "I was supposed primarily to bring an end to the fighting."
Thirty Minutes. On the initiative of Chiang Kaishek, Marshall testified, all Chinese political parties—including the Communists—had agreed to confer about ways & means of unifying China. Marshall's directive said that the unification should be built around Chiang, and all Communist armies folded into his. It also provided that Chiang was to be pressured into making concessions too, on pain of losing economic and military aid from the U.S. A big meeting in Chungking had been agreed upon before Marshall got there, just before Christmas, 1945. Marshall had two weeks in which to persuade Nationalists and Communists to quit shooting at each other before sitting down together; he arranged a cease-fire just 30 minutes before the conference began. At this meeting, the Communists and Nationalists agreed to a constitutional convention in May, and to setting up a committee for demobilizing and amalgamating the two big armies (there were to be 50 Nationalist and ten Communist divisions). Marshall was made adviser to the committee.
Marshall got a working agreement for the demobilization, and then left for Washington. When he returned a month later, he found the parties deadlocked. "From that time onward, it was a development of inability to produce any agreements . . . which did not involve such extreme suspicions on both sides that a coalition cabinet to my mind was just out of the question."
Hadn't he been hopeful at first?
"It looked like it had a fair chance of success," said Marshall, "because the Communists were very anxious to go through with it, because I think quite evidently they felt that their discipline and their strength, particularly with the people of the lower classes, the peasantry, was so much better than that of the Nationalist government that they could gain the control politically. And the hope in the matter, so far as I saw it, was that other parties and the nonparty group could coalesce and the Generalissimo back them ... to hold the balance of power between the two, alongside of the evident factor to me and to my associates that the Kuomintang government was utterly incapable of suppressing the Communists by military means."
Gradually, as Communist propaganda attacked the U.S., and him personally, and after Communists shot two U.S. marines in a convoy to Tientsin, Marshall concluded that there was no possibility of further mediation.