MAO MEETS THE OKLAHOMA COWBOY:

About the Book

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

On December 5, 1945, Major General Patrick Jay Hurley (retired), ex-coal miner and cowboy, former Ambassador to China and onetime Secretary of War, appeared as the first and star witness at a hastily called hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Time reported: “A crowd jam-packed the big chamber. Ex-Ambassador Hurley had promised to pull no punches, to name names and dates and places, to expand his charges that career diplomats had done ‘an inside job’ of sabotaging U.S. foreign policy, particularly in China.” The piece, subtitled “Hurley-Burley,” continued with: “His audience was not disappointed in the show. Pat Hurley came out with a roar, both fists swinging, his white mustache bristled, his black-ribboned pince-nez wobbled on his nose.” The Time story features a photograph of the former Ambassador, posing dramatically with a snarl and an upraised fist, over the caption, “The fuse fizzled into smoke . . . . ” An adjacent photograph of Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, who was summoned to answer Hurley’s accusations, depicts the gentlemanly Secretary with a calm mien. The caption reads “. . . but the smoke brought action.”

Patrick Hurley’s accusations before the Senate Committee and the press coverage that had accompanied his resignation as United States (U.S.) Ambassador to China the previous week became the spark that ignited what was to become almost two decades of political turmoil over the conduct of American foreign policy. Hurley’s pronouncements gave the Republican Party an issue with which they would batter the Truman Administration and Democrat candidates for years, even after the former Ambassador’s name was all but forgotten by the public. An ambitious politician from Wisconsin would grasp Hurley’s innuendoes, make them his own, and fashion a spectacular, albeit brief, career in the political spotlight before self-destructing. Right-wing activists Alfred Kohlberg, Walter Judd, George Sokolsky, Fulton Lewis, Jr., Henry Regnery, and Robert Welch all borrowed from Hurley and each would correspond regularly with the former Ambassador in the years following Hurley’s testimony. In the days after the Senate hearing, groups espousing virtually every right-wing cause from anti-communism to anti-fluoridation would inundate Hurley with flattering acknowledgments.

Hoping to cash in on his status as an “original Cold Warrior,” Pat Hurley ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat from his adopted state of New Mexico in 1946, 1948, and 1952. In 1946, the margin was only 4,000 votes. After his 1952 defeat, the tempestuous former diplomat demanded a recount because he believed that he could not have lost, given the Republican tide that year, unless fraud had marked the election. Bitter diatribes bemoaning the supposed treason and incompetence of the Truman State Department marked his campaign oratory. While previously, on November 27, 1945, two hours before he had resigned in a fury and issued his first public denunciations, Patrick Hurley met with President Harry Truman and without a word of complaint agreed to return to his post in Chongqing (Chungking) . In his testimony before the Senate he publicly charged that senior State Department officials in the Truman Administration had actively sought to suborn U.S. policies in order to aid the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Shortly thereafter, Hurley approached Truman’s Personal Secretary to inquire if the President would be willing to give him another assignment.

To conclude that the behavior of Franklin Roosevelt’s personal envoy to China occasionally bordered on the inexplicable is, perhaps, to engage in understatement. Without delving into psychoanalysis, the details of the upbringing and early life of Patrick Hurley do provide clues to his temperament and thought processes. This paper includes a narrative of Hurley’s early years in an attempt to explore the values and assumptions th

About the Author