View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Texas A&M University THE TURNING POINT: PERCEPTIONS AND POLICIES CONCERNING COMMUNIST CHINA DURING THE KENNEDY YEARS A Thesis by JEFFREY PETER CREAN Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Approved by: Chair of Committee, Jason C. Parker Committee Members, Terry H. Anderson Di Wang William J. Norris Head of Department, David Vaught December 2012 Major Subject: History Copyright 2012 Jeffrey Peter Crean ABSTRACT When analyzing the policies of the John F. Kennedy administration towards the People’s Republic of China, previous historians have focused on the lack of substantive change, emphasizing the continuity of action with the prior polices of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. At the same time, a number of historians have noted that it was during the years Kennedy was in office that a majority of the American people began viewing communist China as a greater threat to world peace than the Soviet Union. However, none have sought to explain this sizeable shift in public opinion, or analyze its potential impact on policy. This thesis incorporates archival materials with contemporary print and visual media to make a connection between the sources of public opinion shifts and a change in the assumptions upon which U.S. China policy was based. Almost from the moment the new president assumed office, Robert Komer at the National Security Council and Chester Bowles at the State Department began pushing for changes in China policy based on the assumptions that the communist regime was not a “passing phase,” would only become more powerful and over time constitute an inexorable greater threat to U.S. interests in Asia, and that rapprochement, rather than isolation, was the best means of ameliorating this threat. Together with James Thomson, Roger Hilsman, and eventually Walt Rostow, they pushed for the adoption of what A. Doak Barnett would later term “Containment Without Isolation.” While the Sino-Soviet split accentuated charges of Chinese anti-white racism and the Great Leap Forward reinforced the sense of Mao’s irrationality, the Sino-Indian War confirmed both rising ii Chinese power and their leadership’s capacity for rational calculation. Meanwhile, in the popular culture, particularly motion pictures, the Yellow Peril enjoyed a revival as Chinese villains stepped to the fore, beginning to free themselves of their Soviet masters. However, while foreign Chinese were feared as never before, Chinese in America gained new acceptance. Laying the groundwork for the next five decades of China policy and enemy images, Kennedy’s Thousand Days constituted a turning point. iii DEDICATION To My Parents iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I write this at the culmination of the research, writing, revising, and defending of my Master’s Thesis, a moment which I hope will be less of an ending than a beginning. This project occasioned my first archival research trip, my first attempts at cultural analysis, and my first in-depth investigations of media and public opinion. The first, I intend, of many. I plan to make the material in this work the hinge of my dissertation, both chronologically and thematically. My title, “The Turning Point,” came to me while filling out the first request form for document boxes at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on a Monday morning in Boston in July 2011. The triplicate form included a line requesting a title for the research project. The presence of this question, which inspired my title that sunny morning, was the least the staff at the JFK Library did for me over the next three days. I would like to offer them my sincere thanks, as well as the archivists at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University in New Haven, where I spent an enormously productive day, and the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, where I concluded my archival research over the course of two days. This work would not exist without all of their prompt and efficient assistance. This thesis would not exist in its present form without the comments, critiques, and criticisms of my adviser in the Texas A&M University History Department, Dr. Jason Parker. For more than one year, he has guided this work from piles of document v snapshots and magazine page scans into this collection of prose, footnotes, and, I hope, cogent and potentially provocative arguments. I must also thank my other committee members from the History Department, Dr. Terry Anderson and Dr. Di Wang, for their participation. I wish to offer special thanks to Dr. William Norris from the Bush School, who was kind enough to join my committee a little more than a month before my defense. I look forward to working with all of you on my dissertation. Finally, I must thank my colleague, David Villar, for bringing to my attention the relevance of the novel Starship Troopers. Without his mentioning of the Chinese subject matter in that work, my sixth chapter would have been far less interesting. As it turned out, Robert Heinlein’s 1959 bestseller allowed me to connect my cultural analysis of Kennedy-era films with an eight decade-long American literary tradition of exploiting and inflaming the gelbe gefahr. The early 1960s were the years when an old fear, previously groundless, became for the first time remotely plausible. Without David, my attempts at cultural analysis would have been lacking in historical context. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR CHANGE…....1 CHAPTER II. CHESTER BOWLES AND ROBERT KOMER: RETHINKING U.S. CHINA POLICY AMIDST AMERICAN FEAR AND CHINESE LOATHING...14 CHAPTER III. TAMING THE COLOSSUS IN TIME: CHINA AS A THREAT TO ITSELF AND OTHERS……………………………………………………….…....53 CHAPTER IV. “THE MONOLITH NO LONGER EXISTS”: HOW AMERICANS VIEWED THE EMERGING SINO-SOVIET SPLIT…………………………………..91 CHAPTER V. THE “YEAR OF ACTION”: DILEMMAS OF CONTAINMENT AND THE SINO-INDIAN WAR………………………………………………...……131 CHAPTER VI. YELLOW PERIL WITH A TINGE OF RED: CHANGING IMAGES OF THE CHINESE IN THE TIME OF CAMELOT……………………….164 CHAPTER VII. CONCLUSION: POSTURING AND POLICY……………………..203 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………….…………..217 vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR CHANGE “Ultimately there is no such thing as an inscrutable people – only uninformed onlookers.”1 Perhaps more than anything else, what frightened the Kennedy administration about communist China was its apparent lack of fear. Mao Zedong habitually referred to the United States, hegemon of the Pacific, and most powerful nation on the planet, as a “Paper Tiger.” Chinese leaders extolled the virtues of the sorts of asymmetric “Wars of National Liberation” which had preserved their own ragtag forces during the decades before they seized power, drove the French out of Indochina, and were proving a mighty nuisance to the British in Malaya. Most frightening of all were Mao's stated refusals to be intimidated by America's massive nuclear arsenal. At a time when the leaders of both superpowers made a point of proclaiming their horror at the prospect of a nuclear holocaust, Mao's apparent welcoming of such a global calamity was positively terrifying, and did much to cement his image as a bloodthirsty madman. The lives of millions may have meant little to Joseph Stalin, but Mao talked calmly of losing hundreds of millions of his own countrymen. 1 Valentin Chu, “China: a Monster Devours Itself,” Life, May 3, 1963, 87. 1 This was because Mao believed the superpowers would lose an even greater proportion of their populations. As the Cold War heated up again in the early 1960s, and the extent of China's demographic and economic expansion during the previous decade became widely known, fears grew that China was biding its time and waiting for the two superpowers to batter each other into oblivion. Within weeks of Kennedy assuming the presidency, Richard Hirsch at the National Security Council addressed this fear in a memo to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow. He began by claiming he was adding a piece to “the Chinese puzzle,” a presumed reference to their Oriental inscrutability. However, Hirsch proceeded to analyze the Chinese as if they were in fact highly scrutable. Hirsch's concern was Mao's supposed belief that “the Chinese would win in the event of a U.S.-USSR thermonuclear war.” His goal was “to disabuse the Chinese of this notion.” His solution was bloody-minded in its own right. Hirsch wondered if it would be “reasonable to set aside a certain number of extremely dirty bombs and the means of laying them down a north-south line, and let Mao know through suitable channels that they will be reserved for China in the event of a U.S.-USSR clash.”2 If the United States and the Soviet Union were going to destroy each other, Hirsch wanted the Chinese to know they would be going down with them. Besides a willingness to use nuclear weapons against a nation which at the time did not possess them in a conflict that nation might not be a direct participant in, this demonstrated that policy makers perceived the Chinese as perhaps not so puzzling after 2 Richard Hirsch, Memorandum for Mr. Rostow, February 14, 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, National Security Files, Box 21a, Folder 2. 2 all. A true madman cannot be deterred. Yet Hirsch clearly believed that signals sent by the U.S. government could discourage Mao's belligerence and adventurism. During the Kennedy administration, prominent officials reviewing China's seemingly reckless behavior during the past decade came to the conclusion that Mao, for all his tough talk, was in fact a low-stakes gambler who invariably backed down when confronted with superior force.