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For this briefing I was to suffer. I did not know, when I told Hurley that his unannounced and unbriefed mission was probably futile, how much it would enrage him. But 20 years later, when the documents were published, I read that the next morning, November 8, Hurley had sent a dispatch to the State Department concerning my disruptive presence: "Theodore White," wrote Hurley in his classified message, "... told me that he had just talked to Chairman Mao and Mao had told him that there was not any possible chance of an agreement between him and Chiang K'ai-shek ... White's whole conversation was definitely against the mission with which I am charged."
That report would remain filed in the dossiers of American intelligence for years, and would return to plague my life many years later, when I was accused of being one of those who "lost China to the Reds."
Unintended Consequences
The big war was over, and China's civil war was being won by Mao's Communists. White was no longer with TIME—the result of a dispute with Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Henry R. Luce over the magazine's policy toward Chiang—and he shifted his front-row seat to Europe. There the Marshall Plan was beginning to work wonders, and also to produce some surprises:
The Law of Unintended Consequences is what twists history's chronology into drama. Our treatment of England and Germany is a classic example of the Law's operation. After victory we began by seeking to punish the Germans for Hitler's savageries and to help the British for having defended freedom's way for all people. We ended, by the logic of the Marshall Plan and the Law of Unintended Consequences, in dismissing from greatness the British, our allies, and elevating the Germans, our enemies, to the status of Europe's senior power.
This historic reversal was not at all intended. Twice in one generation Germany had been our most violent enemy. Neither its military governor, General Lucius Clay, nor anyone else in the U.S. Army enjoyed asking the Congress for "Army" appropriations to feed or help Germans.
The result, thirty years later, is amusing to consider. I first stumbled on its roots in a conversation with one of Lucius Clay's economic experts in the Villa Hügel, the quintessential private Teutonic mansion of the Krupp family in Essen, all smelling of walnut oil and echoing of Wagner. The Villa Hugel was the command point and surveillance center for Allied occupation of the Ruhr. Clay's expert was quite simple. "Our policy." he said, "is to make these bastards work their way back." The Germans should be forced to work, and work hard, he felt, to pay for the food, fiber and raw material that American humanitarians believed we must ship in via the Marshall Plan.
Other West European governments were democratic governments; as all modern elected governments must, they promised more—more good houses, more