(9 of 20)
In his dark office, Chiang sat in his high-backed chair, listening to me with visible distaste because his meddling sister-m-law insisted he had to. I talked of the dying; then of the taxes; then of the extortions. It was obvious he did not know what was going on. I tried to break through by telling him about the cannibalism. He said that cannibalism in China was impossible I said that I had seen dogs eating people on the roads. He said that was impossible. But there I had him. I had asked Harrison Forman to accompany me to Chiang's office, for he had photographs of famine conditions. His pictures clearly showed dogs standing over dugout corpses. The Generalissimo's knee began to jiggle slightly, in a nervous tic. He took out his little pad and brush pen and began to make notes. He asked for names of officials; he wanted more names; he wanted us to make a full report to him, leaving out no names. In a flat manner, as if restating a fact to himself, he said that he had told the army to share its grain with the people. Then he thanked us; told me that I was a better investigator than "any of the investigators I have sent on my own." And I was ushered out.
Heads I know, did roll, starting, I assume, with those at the hapless telegraph office of Loyang, which had let slip to America the embarrassment of death in Honan. But lives were saved —and saved by the power of the American press.
Yahoo in Yenan
By late 1944, the military situation in China was desperate. Chiang and Stilwell were at an impasse; and Nationalist and Communist troops were faced off, as ready to open civil war against each other as to fight the advancing Japanese. To settle these intractable quarrels, President Roosevelt sent a special emissary:
All too often the dialogue of great historic forces is skewed by the spin of the initial conversation—and the dialogue of the American Democracy and Chinese Communism was thus skewed by their first official contact. The spokesman of China was Mao Tse-tung; the spokesman of America was Major General Patrick Hurley. Mao was a genius, Hurley was an ignoramus, and Hurley's arrival in Yenan during that first week in November 1944, to begin American negotiations with Chinese Communists, is a classic instance of the derailment of history by accident.
Hurley had made his mark as a politician in the Republican convention of 1928 in Houston, where he was one of the floor managers corralling delegates for Herbert Hoover. An Oklahoma corporation lawyer, he got his piece of the traditional share-out of office after a Presidential victory, being named Secretary of War in 1928. Later Franklin Roosevelt, making the war a bipartisan effort, sent Hurley, now accoutered as a major general, to negotiate with Chiang K'ai-shek for both the creation of a coalition government between Communists and Nationalists, and