Патрик Джей Херли: Американ саяхаты мен саясаткерінің өмірі мен қызметі

American diplomat and politician

Patrick Jay Hurley (January 8, 1881July 30, 1963) was an American politician and diplomat. He was the United States Secretary of War from 1929 to 1933, but is best remembered for being Ambassador to China in 1945, during which he was instrumental in getting Joseph Stilwell recalled from China and replaced with the more diplomatic General Albert Coady Wedemeyer. A man of humble origins, Hurley's lack of what was considered to be a proper ambassadorial demeanor and mode of social interaction made professional diplomats scornful of him. He came to share pre eminent army strategist Wedemeyer's view that the Chinese Communists could be defeated and America ought to commit to doing so even if it meant backing the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai shek to the hilt. Frustrated, Hurley resigned as Ambassador to China in 1945, publicised his concerns about high ranking members of the State Department, and alleged they believed that the Chinese Communists were not totalitarians and that America's priority was to avoid allying with a losing side in the civil war.

Patrick was born near Lehigh in the Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory on January 8, 1883, to Pierce O'Neil and Mary Kelly Hurley. His parents immigrated to the United States from Ireland and settled in Indian Territory. He started working as a mule driver for coal mines at age 11 alongside his father and at age 15 attempted to enlisted in the Rough Riders during the Spanish American War, but was turned away for being too young. He worked while attending Indian College (now Bacone College) where he graduated in 1905. He received his law degree from the National University School of Law, Washington, in 1908.

Hurley enlisted in the Indian Territorial Volunteer Militia in 1903 and he later served in the Oklahoma National Guard. In 1916, he was called to active duty and participated in the Pancho Villa Expedition. After the expedition, he was made a Judge Advocate General's Department and assigned to Washington D. C. He was successful in delivering additional food and ammunition to the soldiers on three separate occasions but could not evacuate them. The first and potentially only high ranking US military officer to be granted access to Soviet combat operations on the Eastern Front, Hurley reported amiable relations with Soviet military officers. He gave his Soviet aides nicknames from Native Americans chiefs, "Rain in the Face" and "Sitting Bull." He also reported that the Soviet generals "were interested in the amount of war supplies–especially planes, tanks, and trucks–that the United States [could] furnish Russia" and that they were adamant that a second front needed to be opened soon. An Iranian American historian, Abbas Milani, described Hurley as "an odd and eccentric character" who was "horrified" by the "abject poverty amongst the people and arrogant disdain for the populations by the British and Soviet ambassadors." Hurley argued that Iran's two main problems were the illiteracy of most Iranians and Iran's semi colonial status to the Soviet Union and Britain. The success of Operation Ichigo brought to a head the long simmering conflict between General Joseph Stilwell ("Vinegar Joe") and Generalissimo Chiang Kai shek. It was that crisis that brought Roosevelt to send Hurley to China. Hurley arrived in China in August 1944, as a personal envoy from Roosevelt to Chiang. His written directive from the President was as follows:

You are hereby designated as my personal representative with the Generalissimo Chiang Kai shek, reporting directly to me. Your principal mission is to promote efficient and harmonious relations between the Generalissimo and General [Joseph] Stilwell to facilitate General Stilwell's exercise of command over the Chinese armies placed under his direction. You will be charged with additional missions. On his way to Chongqing, the capital of the Republic of China at the time, Hurley had stopped in Moscow to meet Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, who claimed to him that Mao and the rest of the Chinese Communists were "margarine Communists" and that the Soviet Union was not associated with them. The claims were accepted by Hurley at face value. Besides getting Chiang to cede more command powers to Stilwell, Hurley was also ordered to ensure that Chinese Communists accepted Stilwell as their commander and to see if it were possible for American Lend Lease aid to go to Mao Zedong in Yan'an. Eventually, Stilwell's belief in Chiang's incompetence and corruption reached such proportions that Stilwell sought to cut off Lend Lease aid to China in October 1944. Hurley maintained that his talks with Chinese Foreign Minister T. V. Soong were going well. Hurley warned Stilwell at a meeting at the US embassy in Chongqing that the harsh language of the Stilwell's plan to create a Chinese United Front under his command would offend Chiang. In a speech before the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang that was leaked to the Chinese press, Chiang denounced Stilwell and said that to accept the American ultimatum would be to accept a new imperialism that would make him no different from the Japanese collaborator Wang Jingwei in Nanjing. Before sending his cable, Hurley showed it to Stilwell, who accused Hurley to his face of "cutting my throat with a dull knife." On 7 November 1944, Hurley visited Yan'an to meet Mao with the aim of creating a united front to unite the Communists and the Kuomintang to fight the Japanese, which Hurley viewed as a chance for personal glory for himself. Chiang wanted Hurley to meet Mao, partly to please Roosevelt and partly because he expected Hurley to fall out with the Communists. When Hurley arrived via plane at Yan'an, he was greeted by Zhou Enlai and Colonel David D. Barrett of the American Dixie Mission to the Communists. Mao called for a coalition government, a joint military council with an equal number of Communist and Kuomintang generals, US military aid to the Chinese Red Army, and the freeing of all political prisoners, most notably Marshal Zhang Xueliang, the "Young Marshal" and former warlord of Manchuria who had kidnapped Chiang in 1936, during the Xi'an incident. Mao and Hurley both signed the declaration with Hurley proudly writing next to his name "Personal Representative of the President of the United States". In early November 1944, upon the resignation of Ambassador Clarence E. Gauss, Hurley was officially offered the ambassadorship to China but initially declined "with a statement that the duties he had been called upon to perform in China had been the most disagreeable that he had ever performed and further, he felt that his support of Chiang Kai shek and the National Government of China had increased the opposition directed toward himself by the un American elements in the State Department." Upon receiving a telegram from Roosevelt on November 17, urging him to take the job because of the critical nature of the situation, he reluctantly accepted. Hurley's appointment was greeted with dismay by the professional diplomats at the embassy in Chongqing, who complained that Hurley knew nothing of China and was out of his depth. An American diplomat, Graham Peck, wrote, "His handsome aquiline head suggested a Roman burst capriciously passed up with butterflies of a huge bow tie, pinch nose glasses, curly white mustache and coiffure." Hurley liked to be addressed as "General," always wore all of his medals at public events, and used "we" instead of "I" to address people as if everyone was in agreement with what he was saying, a speaking habit that many found very annoying. Hurley's first acts as ambassador were to buy a new Cadillac and to have the embassy redecorated in a grandiose style that he saw fit for an ambassador of the United States. In January 1945, Hurley met the US admiral, Miles, and the Chinese secret police chief, Dai Li, who first informed him of a secret visit to Yan'an by Colonel William Bird of the OSS of which the ambassador had been unaware. As Wedemeyer was living at the embassy with Hurley, that made for unpleasant living arrangements; Jacoby later recalled that the two had "loud, noisy quarrels" lasting well into the night and Wedemeyer sent several cables to Washington questioning Hurley's mental fitness to be ambassador. When the American military attache suggested in a cable in March 1945 that the Chinese might be willing to accept Hong Kong being liberated from the Japanese by the British, Hurley wrote to Washington that it was "British imperialist propaganda and while supporters of this propaganda may be entitled to their own views in their premises, I know of no reason why American officers serving in China should undertake to sponsor such propaganda or to disseminate it within the American government." Hurley's relations with General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart who was Churchill's special envoy to China were not good, as Hurley saw Carton de Wiart as a sinister figure upholding the British Empire, which Hurley wanted to see dismantled. Roosevelt had also sent Hurley to China to keep "an eye on European imperialism," a directive that Hurley very seriously, believing America had a special mission to end all European power and influence in Asia. He held out hope that after Roosevelt's death, President Harry S. Truman would recognize what he regarded as the errors of Yalta and would rectify the situation, but his efforts in that direction were in vain. After Japan had signed an armistice with the Allies on 2 September 1945, Chiang had suggested a meeting with Mao in Chongqing. The civil war was expected to resume in China, and Chiang wanted to be seen by the Chinese people as having done everything to avoid the civil war before it started again. Mao said he would not fly to Chongqing unless Hurley was on the plane as he believed that otherwise, Chiang would shoot it down. Chiang wrote in his diary: "How comical this is! Never imagined that the Communists could be so chicken hearted and shameless. Only three days ago communist newspapers and radio denounced Hurley as a reactionary imperialist. This selfsame imperialist has become Mao's guarantor of safety". In September 1945, a plane landed in Chongqing, out of which the first man to emerge was Hurley who in the words of the British journalist Jonathan Fenby had "a broad smile on his face as he waved his fedora hat in triumph," followed by Mao. On November 26, 1945, Hurley submitted a scathing letter of resignation, two hours after his meeting with Truman. Hurley wrote in his letter of resignation, "I requested the relief of the career men who were opposing the American policy in the Chinese Theater of war. These professional diplomats were returned to Washington and placed in the Chinese and Far Eastern Divisions of the State Department as my supervisors. Some of these same career men whom I relieved have been assigned as supervisors to the Supreme Commander in Asia. In such positions most of them have continued to side with the Communist armed party and at times with the imperialist bloc against American policy." Besides liberal diplomats, Hurley lashed out against the "imperialist" powers of France, Britain and the Netherlands, which he accused of seeking to maintain their empires in Asia at the expense of American interests.

Though Hurley had attempted in 1944 to create a "united front" in China and at times had been very sympathetic towards Mao himself, all of that was forgotten as Hurley reinvented himself as a hard right Republican who promptly become to American conservatives a "martyr," an honest diplomat who had been undercut by the supposed "fellow travellers" and Soviet spies in the infiltrated State Department's Soviet spies, who had controlled America's China policy. The Nationalists' defeat by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 caught the US by surprise and led to the question "Who Lost China?" to become a popular subject as recriminations set in against the State Department officials' China Hands. In 1950, when Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the State Department of being ridden with Soviet spies who were all "Communists and queers" and were the ones responsible for the United States "losing" China, Hurley publicly endorsed McCarthy's in a 1950 speech. Hurley stated that his efforts to aid Chiang had been undercut by Roosevelt, whom Hurley portrayed as the puppet of Soviet spy Alger Hiss. Hurley was the Republican candidate for a seat in the United States Senate for the state of New Mexico in 1946, 1948 and 1952, but he lost all three attempts against the Democratic nominees. Hurley started the United Western Minerals Corporation of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was involved in the rush to start uranium mining in the Ambrosia Lake region of New Mexico in the 1950s.

Both contemporary and modern assessment of Hurley have not been kind. Michael Burleigh wrote, "US policy was not well served by its Ambassador to China from late 1944 onwards, a former Republican secretary of war called Patrick Hurley, a drunken idiot given to Choctaw war cries. Oblivious of China's delicate protocols, he referred to Chiang as 'Mr. Shek' and Mao Zedong as 'Moose Dung' in the course of shuttle trips designed to bring the two together to convert China into a springboard for the final showdown with the Japanese. Mao's cronies called Hurley 'the Clown'; his US diplomatic colleagues dubbed him 'the Albatross.'" Aside from Hoover himself, Hurley was the last living member of the Hoover administration.