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Pearl Harbor decided the nascent controversy only hinted at in his review, and consigned Treat, for all his meticulous work, to the ashcan of lost causes, and his Japanese colleague at Stanford University, Yamato Ichihashi, whose friendship doubtless influenced his view, was packed off to a relocation center, while Griswold’s study did become the standard for students of American relations with the Far East. Though never revised (Griswold’s subsequent assumption of the presidency of Yale University cut short his career as a working scholar and, lamentably, he died before he could return to it in retirement), the study stood the test of decades, and, brought into the paperback brigade, shined far into the postwar era, the pole star of its field. As Treat predicted in his review, many books have covered the subject matter of Griswold’s individual chapters, and yet his “almost surgical cutting through verbiage to find the vital truth” about the whole half century remains peerlessly done.
Having said all this and having quite properly paid tribute to a great book by a great scholar, let us now ask one of those brutal little questions, which “surgical cutting” and “vital truth” require occasionally. Did The Far Eastern Policy of the United States really measure up to the acclaim it received? Of course it did, we answer defensively. Griswold worked hard and long on it, performed careful analysis, provided source materials, and held himself to the highest standards of scholarship.
Indeed. And yet, looking at his study backwards through the turmoil of subsequent years, the communist triumph in China, the Korean War, Taiwan, Quemoy, and Matsu, Ho Chi Minh, two Vietnams, communist China, Tibet, India, Laos, Cambodia, the Domino theory, communist China and Cuba, Africa, and Latin America, and the late twentieth-century growth of the People’s Republic of China, we realize how little Griswold anticipated the Far East of our postmeridian twentieth-century world.
The word “China” does not even appear in his table of contents. Startled, we turn to the index. There, happily, China occurs, but we find only the China of open door, concession scrambles, Manchuria, Twenty-one Demands, and tariff autonomy. Hopefully we search the index for the words “China, civil war in” but we find only warlords, no communists, Chinese or other, not even Borodin. Definitely no Mao.