Marshall Mission

[3][4][5][6] US Ambassador to China Clarence Gauss recommended for the United States to "pull up the plug and let the whole Chinese Government go down the drain."

Thus, in a desperate attempt to keep the country whole, US President Harry S Truman in late 1945 sent General George C. Marshall as his special presidential envoy to China to negotiate a unity government.

His goal was to unify the Nationalists and the Communists with the hope that a strong non-Communist China would act as a bulwark against the encroachment of the Soviet Union.

Marshall had already left in 1946, due to deteriorating health, domestic criticism of Truman's handling of the China situation, and other pressing foreign policy objectives.

On 9 June 1951, Douglas MacArthur charged that the post-war Marshall Mission to China had been "one of the greatest blunders in American diplomatic history, for which the free world is now paying in blood and disaster"[12] in a telegram to Senator William F. Knowland.

"[14] McCarthy argued that General Albert Coady Wedemeyer had prepared a wise plan that would keep China a valued ally but that it had been sabotaged; "only in treason can we find why evil genius thwarted and frustrated it.

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, who was running for and became US President, denounced the Truman administration's failures in Korea, campaigned alongside McCarthy, and refused to defend Marshall's policies.