(10 of 20)
Hurley had already failed to make peace between Stilwell and Chiang when he decided to take off for Yenan to make peace between Communists and Nationalists. Hurley was talkative, with the Southwestern garrulousness that marked Lyndon Johnson—his concept being that, if he held a conversation together by his own chatter long enough, he might find out what he himself was talking about. His style was caught best by a young congressman, sent by Roosevelt to China in November 1944, Mike Mansfield, later to be the Majority Leader of the U S 'Senate. Mansfield reported pithily to Roosevelt: "I saw Major General Pat Hurley and we had a very long talk. He talked for two hours and forty-seven minutes, and I talked for thirteen minutes."
Hurley loved dramatics—and what could be more dramatic than the personal representative of the President of the US. dropping in, from the air, for the first summit conference of the American state and the Chinese revolution, unannounced. Because it was a dull afternoon, John Paton Davies, the State Department's political adviser to Stilwell, Colonel David Barrett, chief of U.S. military observers in Yenan, and I had gone to the airstrip to see one of our rare weather-service planes arrive. But there was a second plane, and out of it descended a six-foot-three-inch character in American uniform and overcoat, the pants pressed knife-sharp, a silver-haired, bushy-mustached major general, whose chest was covered with ribbons from shoulder to rib cage. It was Hurley. Barrett, as senior American military officer, approached, looked the general up and down, offered the observation, "General, it looks as if you have a medal there for every campaign except Shays' Rebellion." Barrett was to suffer for this, as were I and Davies, and all who tried to instruct Hurley on China.
No more than five minutes could have elapsed before a ragged group of Communist Chinese soldiers raced down from the hill to line up in an honor guard. And almost instantly thereafter, appeared the Communist high command: Mao Tse-tung himself, in a baggy unpressed cotton-padded blue cloak; Chu Teh, the Commander in Chief, in the orange-tan thick woolen uniform of a common soldier; Yeh Chien-ying, the Chief of Staff, in the smart khaki-colored wool uniform of an officer; and Chou Enlai, in a dingy brown leather coat. There were only four automobiles in Yenan then, and when Mao required one, his vehicle was a converted ambulance. Out of this ambulance they now rushed, trotting pell-mell to greet Franklin Roosevelt's emissary. Hurley towered above the stocky Chinese like Captain John Smith surrounded by Powhatan's tribal braves.
Hurley advanced on the honor guard of disheveled soldiers, stood for a moment, and then let out a loud screech—"Yahoo!" —giving the Choctaw yell of his native Oklahoma. We gaped; but this was President Roosevelt's choice. That evening, since the Communists had already prepared a banquet in honor of the November 7 anniversary of the great Russian Revolution, we were all invited. At that banquet, when Hurley was called on to speak, he rose, paused, and then yelled again at the top of his lungs, "Yahoo!"
Of more consequence to me was my conversation with Hurley between