One reason that Nixon could go to China was that Nixon had shed so much blood, literal and metaphorical, over the “loss of China.” The idea that one might split the USSR and the People’s Republic was not something that Kissinger and Nixon discovered one day in 1971. The State Department was perfectly aware of the possibility in 1949. Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, seriously considered recognizing Mao’s government, as our anti-Soviet allies in London did quickly and without drama. But “the Republicans, having lost the ‘48 election, decided to win the Chinese revolution instead” (as one US diplomat quipped).
Acheson, who spent most of his waking hours thinking about how to rebuild global capitalism, found himself accused of being a Communist. With a Trumpian gift for nicknames, Nixon dubbed him “the Red Dean of the College of Cowardly Containment.” Recognizing Mao was out of the question. Worse, Acheson was forced to do what he had tried hard to avoid: renewed US support for Chiang Kai-Shek’s dictatorship in Taiwan. This decision, which the “Red” Chinese reasonably understood as direct intervention into China’s civil war, did not improve Washington-Beijing relations. The sudden reversal of US policy on Taiwan influenced Mao’s willingness to intervene directly in the Korean War. By the end of 1950, Chinese soldiers and US soldiers were shooting each other. Normalization became impossible—until, twenty years later, Nixon seized the opportunity he had made for himself.
The China Lobby was hardly the only force behind the Second Red Scare. Nor was Nixon its only progenitor. But Tricky Dick has a better claim to the title than Joe McCarthy, who didn’t step into the spotlight until 1950, two years after Nixon sponsored legislation to require “individuals who knowingly and willfully participate in the world communist movement” to register with the attorney general, and thus to face criminal sanctions. To head off these measures—but also in service of its own ends—the Truman administration implemented a suite of repressive measures, including the deportation of immigrant radicals. As Richard Freeland writes in his classic account, “aliens who were active in opposition to Cold War foreign policy . . . were arrested and held without bail on Ellis Island.” For example:
Ferdinand Smith was picked up twenty-four hours after he shared a speakers’ platform with Henry Wallace and while en route to a meeting of the National Maritime Union at which endorsement of the Marshall Plan was the main item on the agenda.