(5 of 10)
Making the Issue. With a single exception (a 1946 loan to Britain), Knowland has supported every proposal to bolster Europe. But his studies convinced him that the U.S. was failing badly in its Far Eastern policies. While the State Department was enamored with the Chinese Communists, Knowland saw Asia as the vital back door through which the Communists could get to Europe, often cites Lenin's thesis that "the road to Paris lies through Peking."
In 1948 Knowland succeeded in getting $400 million into the Marshall Plan appropriations for "the general area of China," because he was convinced that Nationalist Leader Chiang Kai-shek had not received "sufficient support, both moral and material, from the U.S." In 1949 Knowland fought Dean Acheson's confirmation as Secretary of State, partly because Acheson—as Under Secretary—had had much to do with a U.S. policy that pressured Chiang to make peace with the Chinese Communists.
Knowland thundered warnings day after day on the Senate floor as Acheson wrote off Formosa and Korea as beyond the areas of U.S. vital interest. He later leaped again to the attack when congressional investigators discovered that the State Department was distributing to U.S. embassies and consulates in the Far East copies of an issue of The Reporter magazine with articles and an editorial highly sympathetic to Red China. Sure that he saw signs that the U.S. was getting ready to recognize Red Peking, Knowland planted himself solidly in the path of recognition—and from that position he has never budged. Always a stout anti-Communist—even in the days when many of his colleagues still thought warmly of Russia as a trusted wartime ally—Knowland sensed accurately that the Communist struggle for Asia was as desperate and critical as the struggle for Europe. In 1950 he spoke 115 times in the Senate on Far Eastern policy. His voice carried the authority of careful preparation, and other Republican Senators took up the cry, making Bill Knowland's Asia issue one of their basic articles of faith in the 1952 elections.
Up for re-election himself that year, Knowland was overwhelmingly vindicated by both parties. His opponent under California's cross-filing system sneered at him as "the Senator from Formosa." Knowland had only three set speeches. One took five minutes, one took 15 and one half an hour, but each said the same thing: the Truman-Acheson Far Eastern policy was catastrophic. Knowland won both the Republican and Democratic nominations and stood as a political power of the first magnitude.