The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

Those who had been hurt, the real experts, were the young men who had been in China during the storm, who witnessed the collapse of the old order, the death of feudal China in the late forties; as they had watched the rise of the new China they saw the inevitability of its victory and they said so, and they were later victimized by their own prophecies. O. Edmund Clubb, a foreign service officer in China for twenty years, had been interested in Chinese Communism as early as 1931 and was attacked even then because of the attention he paid to it—if he was so interested in it, didn’t that mean that he liked it? (His security file would contain a particularly mindless list of suspicions of people from an earlier day who disliked his energy in analyzing the early roots of Chinese Communism.) Davies and Service had been saying that the Communists were going to win, suggesting that the United States get ready to deal with the new China. Like it or not, the future is theirs, Davies wrote, and we had better recognize it. Of course they were right, and predictably, China fell. Chiang had spread himself too thin rather than conserving his troops and resources and concentrating them in more limited areas, thus forcing the Communists to deal with him (as Davies, among others, was suggesting). But there was little disposition to accept the inevitability of Chiang’s decline (particularly on the part of Republican congressmen who were pushing intensively for a more rapid demobilization to...