EPILOGUE

I covered a few more wars, and near wars (in Russia during Stalingrad was a big point), went home for ten years and cut the lawn and had a family (two) and wrote a few books, until I heard the call of the East again.
Edgar Snow to "Ross," May 8, 1971

Chapter 14
Global War, and Cold War Blues

Snow arrived in India in the spring of 1942, at a moment when that subcontinent was threatened with invasion by Japanese forces that had already conquered neighboring Burma. (The flight across Africa had almost ended in disaster when the plane's radio beam was lost for a considerable time. "You were flying practically by the stars and there were very few," Snow reminisced to the pilot ["Ross"] in 1971, recalling the latter's "cool in bringing us in.") Ed was predictably caustic on the British Raj, both for the rapid defeat in Burma and the inadequate marshaling of India's defenses. The British, Snow recorded in Calcutta, were relying on America "to win back the empire for them." In a subsequent interview with the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, Snow pushed his pet Indusco concepts for India's war effort but found the Briton unreceptive.^[1]

Ed's arrival coincided with the collapse of the Cripps mission to India. Sir Stafford Cripps (a Labour member of Churchill's cabinet) had come bearing London's proposals for postwar constitutional steps to self-rule, aimed at enlisting the Indian National Congress behind the war. The Gandhi-led Congress rejected the offer, demanded immediate independence, and called for nonviolent struggle against British rule. To Snow, despite his pro-Indian nationalist sympathies and harsh criticisms and suspicions of the British, this amounted to "a declaration of war against Britain instead of Japan."^[2]

Snow briefly revisited China from India in late May, flying over the Hump to Chungking. To him, the China situation seemed even further deteriorated since his departure in January 1941. Inflation was rampant,

the living standards of workers and white-collar groups were in sharp decline. With America now in the war, the Chinese considered Japan doomed to defeat. As a result, "the important question [in China] now was, who was going to rule the country after the war," Snow noted. It had sharpened the conflict between the Nationalists and Communists— "whereas on my last visit," Ed added, "the Reds were still nominally under the Generalissimo's absolute command, today they do not pretend to obey his orders unless they consider them useful. This reflects; a big increase in their real power." Hoarding for future eventualities was now the order of the day in China—"of commodities, of guns, of ammunition, of jeeps."^[3]

Ed returned to India and left Delhi in mid-September by air for Teheran. There, in that major lend-lease supply gateway to the Russian front, he waited for the Soviet visa he had applied for many months before; it finally came through in early October. His attitude on entering the Soviet Union for the first time was then at its admiring and sympathetic peak. It was primarily a response to the colossal struggle of the Red Army against the hitherto invincible Wehrmacht, a battle Snow viewed as decisive in determining the outcome of the global conflict. While in India, Snow had pressed Nehru on the Indian National Congress's stance on the war: the "fate of the whole world is being decided in the German-Soviet struggle," he argued to the Indian leader. If Russia is defeated, he continued, "then India, under Britain or under the Axis, cannot survive." And in one of his barbs; at the British, he observed that "Indians" (though really he was speaking for himself) know "that Britain was saved, by one thing and one thing only," and that was "the fact that three million Russians died to break the offensive power of a German army that otherwise would most certainly have put an end to the British empire."^[4]

Snow was especially impressed by the Soviet Union's ability to marshal its human and material resources for the war—in sharp contrast to what he had witnessed in Nationalist China and just seen in India. About "99 percent of the energies of sixteen-united republics seemed to have been mobilized to realize a struggle plan embracing more people and more territory than ever before used to battle an invader," Snow wrote from Russia for the Post in January 1943. It strengthened his longstanding conviction on the superiority of a centrally planned (socialist) economy. ("Only the blind can now deny," he wrote in 1944, "that the triumph of the Red Army is the triumph of Soviet socialism, and above all, Soviet planning.")^[5]

Snow's writings on wartime Russia reflected the above themes, combined with his "people on our side" approach in depicting the sacrifices, spirit, valor, and humanity of Soviet soldiers and civilians alike. His Post articles on Russia from 1943 to 1945 dealt with the superhuman war-production efforts and high morale of factory workers, mostly women; with the exploits of young women partisan fighters he met on the Smolensk front west of Moscow; and with the devastation of Soviet regions recaptured from the Germans. There were also such pieces for his Post readers as "What Kind of a Man Is a Russian General?"; "Is Red Marriage Turning Blue?"; and "Meet Mr. and Mrs. Russia at Home." And though Snow underscored the all-embracing "cult of adoration" built up around "that Man in the Kremlin," he could also give the Soviet dictator an earthy "man of the people" touch: in pausing for drinks of water during a wartime radio address to the nation, Stalin "had apologized for this, saying he had eaten too many herring that morning, and Russia roared with laughter," Snow wrote. In reporting the Russian story, Snow saw as always a larger responsibility: in this instance, to promote Allied unity and understanding in war, and to underline the overriding importance of continued Soviet-American cooperation in the peace to follow. It all made for a relatively benign image of the beleaguered wartime Soviet state and its (personally distasteful to Ed) cult of "Stalin the Great." It seemed equally to lead him to a "positive-realistic" appraisal of Moscow's postwar security requirements and of the future in store for a Soviet-dominated, "reformed" and "fraternal" Eastern Europe.^[6]

In 1944 People on Our Side would sum up Snow's argument for Western accommodation to Russian needs. "The only alternative to mutual recognition of regional security arrangements by West and East," he affirmed, "is the pursuit of a policy of imposing our will by force; it is the policy of preparing for the Third World War, the war of the continents." It was a motif he clung to doggedly, despite souring disillusionments as war ended.^[7]

He had come to Moscow at a particularly grim moment when the ferocious, drawn-out, and critical battle of Stalingrad was mounting in intensity. The encircling Russian counteroffensive in November, and final German surrender there by the end of January 1943, marked a decisive turn in the war against Hitler. Snow visited the Stalingrad battlefront with other correspondents in the aftermath of the German defeat. The devastated city, Ed would write, "was demolished Chapei, in Shanghai, magnified twenty times and the bombed districts of London could have been lost in a corner of it."^[8]

Snow left Russia in April 1943, after a mostly cheerless winter there. He was annoyed at the obtuse censorship and obstructionism of the press department that faced all the foreign correspondents in Moscow. The "cold impersonal climate in which one works day after day," he

recorded, "is what gets one down." The "unbending inflexible character of the whole machine," he added, "kills the average correspondent's objectivity in a very short time." And though he was an ardent advocate of an early Allied landing in western Europe to relieve pressure on the Red Army, he could acidly note, "Wonder why the British never refer to the 2nd front as 'Reopening the First Front' rather than give the R's psychological advantage."^[9]

He flew back to India, where the Congress leaders Gandhi and Nehru had been incarcerated by the British. There was a letter from Peg "with orders to form an Indusco committee here." Not quite "as easy as that," Ed reacted. From Assam in the north, he crossed into Yunnan province over the Hump, now a busy Allied air supply route to China. Dotted with newly built American airfields, this formerly remote region of China had been the setting of Ed's memorable caravan journey into Burma a dozen years before.^[10]

Ed spent some two weeks visiting American military installations around Kunming in Yunnan, and Guilin in neighboring Guangxi. He received his bleakest picture yet of the China situation from U.S. military and foreign service officers. Skyrocketing prices, endemic corruption, smuggling, blackmarket resale of supplies flown in, foreign currency manipulation and speculation, and much more. The American army was paying for everything at an artificially pegged exchange rate that greatly overvalued the inflated Chinese currency. The "result is general extortion and we are looked upon as Santa Claus," Snow noted. Chinese soldiers were undernourished, weary, and generally unfit for combat, and the Generalissimo, Snow was told, was surrounded by "thugs, gangsters, and racketeers." The Chinese say, an American colonel confided, "we [China] carried the ball for six years, now it's your turn." The major 1944 Japanese offensive sweep through east and central China against crumbling Nationalist forces that engulfed many of the new American air bases evidently confirmed these assessments.^[11]

In his 1944 book, Snow would scathingly write, "When I came back to China again from Russia in the middle of 1943, I found that the country's economy had become chaotic, its political life more reactionary than at any time since 1936, and its military efficiency was at its lowest level since the war began."^[12]

From India in July 1943, Snow left for the Middle East and then to England for a first visit. He made the rounds of leading British politicians and other luminaries of varying political persuasions. Ed also collected data, for a Post article, on the results achieved by the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against Germany. For it he interviewed American and British air command figures, including Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. He then returned to the States where he remained until June 1944. In May of that year he had his second personal meeting with Roosevelt. In a conversation that ranged over the globe, Snow pushed his Soviet-American postwar cooperation theme, to which Roosevelt readily concurred. The president accepted Ed's renewed offer to write him from Moscow. "Write me a letter and tell me your impressions of Russia since the Teheran Conference." Snow came away with the belief that the president "will accommodate Russia's demands for her eastern frontier," and with an optimistic feeling that civil war in China might be averted. As in the other two Snow exchanges with the president, it all appeared to typify the engagingly informal and persuasive Roosevelt style. But Snow also felt the president had aged considerably since Ed had last seen him, the first weeks of the war. "His hands shook violently when he reached for a glass of water, as he did several times during the talk. It seemed to me his mind tended to wander.... He did not smoke. He looked fired."^[13]

Snow flew out of Miami on June 5 and learned of D-Day en route to Moscow on June 6. The Soviet capital in summer of 1944, with the Red Army now advancing through eastern Europe, was a bright contrast in weather, mood, and appearance to that of the critical winter months of 1942-1943. Snow was further buoyed by the "astounding" news (received on his thirty-eighth birthday) that his People on Our Side had been chosen as a book dividend by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Probably most cheering of all was his reacquaintance with a young Russian woman he had met briefly on his earlier stay. "Ilena" was in her early twenties, and a student at Moscow University. She was "passing fair," with "azure eyes of a singular shape," as Ed romantically described her in Journey . They went together for some months until the inevitable pain of parting in another Moscow winter. That capital, Snow wrote, "again became a city of wintry pinched faces and grey frosty souls and streets dark with ice."^[14]

While in Russia, Snow made trips to newly liberated sections of Poland and Rumania, getting a sense of the Soviet-orchestrated new political order there. Would the "turn to the left" sociopolitical order in

Eastern Europe lead toward "outright Communism or Socialism," or would it prove to be "the birth pangs of an emancipated society ... nearer to democracy and the Four Freedoms than this part of Europe has known before?" Snow asked in a November 1944-Post piece. It was a question, he wryly concluded, that he "gladly" left to his readers "to think over amid the abundance of America, which everybody in the · world hopes to go on sharing with us on the Lend-Lease principle until something better turns up." Snow also saw the Nazi death camp at Maidanek, near Lublin in Poland, and wrote movingly of the searing evidence of its methodically organized mass extermination of victims. He would visit another such camp at Mauthausen, in Austria, the following May.^[15]

Snow was home once more in the last months of 1944 and into the spring of 1945. He made a rare visit to see his father in Kansas City and in March had his final talk with Roosevelt—soon after the president's return from Yalta and just weeks before his sudden death in April. Snow had also seen his old friend Evans Carlson, recuperating from his war wounds in California. The president spoke warmly of Carlson to Ed and agreed with the latter's characterization of the marine as "just a good old-fashioned New England Christian reformer." "That's right, Absolutely," Roosevelt rejoined, "but the Marine Corps still insists he's a Red!" (Retired Marine Major-General William A. Worton, who knew Carlson in Peking in the 1930s, in later reminiscences judged Carlson to have been a "Red." He related that after Carlson, who died of a heart attack in 1947, had been given an official Arlington burial ["the works"] by the corps, commanding General Vandergrift had remarked, "Thank God, he's gone." Still, Worton added, "withal, he was a very, very brave and capable man.")^[16]

On the political stalemate in China, Roosevelt expressed great disappointment to Snow at the failure of efforts by his special envoy Patrick Hurley to get the KMT and CCP to cooperate. But he evinced full confidence in Hurley and directed his ire at the Generalissimo. "I don't know why Chiang can't get along with these people [the Communists]," he impatiently remarked. "I've been working with two governments in China," Roosevelt "emphatically" told Ed, "and I intend to go on doing so until we can get them together."^[17]

Citing in his 1945 book some of these remarks of the now-deceased president, Snow continued to put his hopes for a political solution in China on the great powers. Only "combined Anglo-American-Soviet pressure on both parties in China," he declared, "could impose a for-

mula even temporarily uniting the anti-Japanese forces in our common war." He fleshed out this thesis in a rather complex May 1945 article in the Post . His analysis drew on his hopes and assumptions that an era of Soviet-American cooperation was unfolding in postwar Europe, with similar prospects envisaged for Asia. In Snow's view, Washington and Moscow were on a converging course in toughened stances against what Ed described as Chiang's plans: to retain intact the power of his regime of "aging reactionaries"; to reoccupy, with American help, all lost Chinese territory (including "recovery" of areas held by the Communists); and to resume the (futile, in Snow's opinion) task of annihilating the Communist "bandits." In a genuine peaceful settlement brokered by the great powers the CCP might be expected ultimately to prevail, but this outcome need not alarm Washington. A united, "progressive," independent, and still far from fully communized China, and in need of much U.S. economic assistance and investment, Ed argued, would be more in accord with American interests than a "reactionary" and potentially fascistic China under the Kuomintang. And for the Soviets, Snow reasoned, support for "the transition from reaction to progress" in China dovetailed with overall Russian security concerns. Still, Snow added some important caveats to his argument. While "it seems certain that the late President discussed China with Stalin" at Yalta, "what was said is so far a military secret." And "if we are going to fight Russia someday, as pessimists believe," then his analysis "should be 'included out.'" Snow would shortly be getting a rude jolt on the first point and, on the second, later cold war disenchantment.^[18]

Moreover, events of the six months preceding Snow's meeting with Roosevelt already cast considerable doubt on the concept of "imposing" an agreement on the contending Chinese parties and their armies. Nor did those events instill great confidence in Roosevelt's resolve or in his full grasp of the realities of the complex China equation. In October 1944 the president had acquiesced to Chiang's demand for the recall of General Joseph Stilwell. The latter had been commander of the China-Burma-India theater and concurrently chief of staff under the Generalissimo for China. He was replaced by General Albert C. Wedemeyer, more acceptable to Chiang, and less abrasive, than "Vinegar Joe." The pompous and increasingly pro-Chiang Patrick Hurley was named ambassador to Chungking, taking over from the resigned ambassador, Clarence Gauss. "The fundamental difference between the Generalissimo and General Stilwell," the correspondent Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote after returning from China at that time, "has been

that the latter has been eager to fight the Japanese in China without delay, and the Generalissimo had hoped he would not have to." In the Stilwell affair, Michael Schaller notes in his book on America's wartime "crusade" in China, "Chiang had accomplished one of the most crucial victories in his remarkable career."^[19]

Neither the Americans nor the Russians could guide or control China's political destiny. With the failure of Washington's final mediation effort, the (General George C.) Marshall Mission President Truman dispatched in December 1945, China erupted in full-scale civil war by the last months of 1946. A contest of arms, by the Chinese themselves, would decide the nation's future. As Michael Schaller concludes, "For a decade, despite a nearly total misunderstanding of China's crisis and an equally murky concept of what it wished to achieve, the United States struggled to become the arbiter of change in China and Asia. Only the fury of the Chinese revolution and the passage of time could begin to erode this arrogance." Snow on his part would soon be revising his stance on such big power interventionism.^[20]

Ed was in western Europe in April 1945 for the ending of the war. After the German surrender in early May, he drove with a fellow correspondent to Soviet-occupied Vienna (the first American journalists to enter the Austrian capital) and then back into Germany. (In both countries he heard many anti-Soviet horror stories of looting and raping in Red Army-occupied zones.) Then on to Paris (its "lovely vistas everywhere") and through much of France. He left by military air transport in late July for Stockholm and Helsinki and. then reentered Russia at Leningrad for what would be his last visit to the Soviet Union. Leningrad was stark, scarred by the terrible ordeal of the 900-day Nazi siege of that city, which cost the lives of one million of its inhabitants. While it was "certainly a great city by contrast with Moscow," Snow noted, "it seems drab and tawdry now in contrast with the grace and supernal beauty of Paris. The people are shabby—shabbier than I have seen in any country of Europe: far more so than any part of occupied Austria or Germany." Whatever "loot" the Russians had taken from Europe "does not seem to have made any impression on Leningradites." There "is little external gaiety in the place. There is no song, no outward sign of joy of living. The people look old, tired, overworked, hungry."^[21]

These impressions mirrored Snow's darkening postwar mood. In Moscow ("lively and animated" compared to Leningrad), he was given a more revealing (and chilling) picture of the Soviet system. Russian acquaintances told of relatives and friends liquidated in the great purges or

shipped off to Siberian camps, and other grim tales of Russian life. "How would Chung-kuo jen [the Chinese—presumably the Chinese Communists] regard this kuo [country] if they knew the true ch'ing-hsing [situation]? Have I been deceiving people? Have I told the whole chen-ti [truth]?" Snow privately anguished.^[22]

In Moscow, Ed learned the details of the new Sino-Soviet "Treaty of Friendship and Alliance," signed in that city on August 14, the day of the Japanese surrender, and a week after the Soviets entered the Pacific conflict. The treaty (and Russia's war entry) carried out secret accords reached by Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in February. Among other provisions, the new treaty restored, in modified form, Russia's pre-1905 railway and warm water port and naval base "rights" in Manchuria; in return, Moscow pledged its "moral, material and military support" solely to the National government led by Chiang. "This is the last and final proof that Moscow's policies are determined solely and only by nationalistic considerations," Snow recorded.^[23]

He left Russia in mid-September, accompanying a U.S. congressional party to Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, he later wrote Saxe Cummins of Random House, he "ate mutton on the palace roof under the moonlight with the King's [Ibn Saud] 39 sons and 60 grandsons, or anyway a good chunk of them." From there he continued on to India, "sat in Delhi for three weeks," and then to Calcutta. He stopped briefly in Bangkok and flew on to Saigon for a week. He found the Indochina scene "very edifying," he told Cummins. After Tokyo's surrender, "the anti-Jap An-namites" had "come out of their holes" and set up an independent government. Then came British troops to "disarm" the Japanese. The British in turn brought in French troops—"Vichyite" troops who had collaborated with the Japanese. "So today it is like this," Snow continued. "Our ex-enemies the Japs, whom the British were to disarm, are advancing as a screen into the interior to push back the poorly armed An-namites. Behind them come Indian troops; behind them come the British. When 'law and order' are restored, the French move in." It was a bitter commentary on the Indochina situation that would remain the baseline of his thinking through the postwar decades of French and American involvement there.^[24]

In November, Snow went on from Saigon to the Philippines. There, in the war-devastated capital of Manila ("much more of a wreck than I had imagined"), Snow meditated on his crumbling marriage, thought back on the women he had known in the course of his wartime global travels, and contemplated the personal life he aspired to in the future. "I

want to get married again as soon as the r. [right] female turns up—have children, a house with children and a farm, garden, all the rest of it. I want to settle at last." But, Snow continued, "I don't see the female, only females?' The "r. female," in the person of Lois Wheeler, would soon turn up, and in time the scenario he had sketched would be fulfilled. However, in the Snow-unfriendly political climate of the 1950s, there would be more settling than he could have anticipated.^[25]

From the Philippines, Snow moved on to Japan and Korea at the end of 1945, covering postwar developments there. But not China. He was now denied entry by the Nationalist government as "unacceptable to China," despite a vigorous protest to sympathetic President Truman by the chief Post editor, Ben Hibbs. Thus Snow', who had been so notably identified with the rise of Maoist communism, did not witness and report the Red drive to victory in the 1946-1949 civil War.^[26]

At a lunch interview with General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo, the supreme commander for the Allied powers informed Snow he (MacArthur) was saving Japan from the Russians. "I'm trying to give them [the Japanese] a taste of freedom," the general declared, "because I believe when they've had it they won't like regimentation." In Korea, Snow watched with foreboding the emerging pattern of two politically polarized occupation zones, Soviet and Panerican, confronting each other on the thirty-eighth parallel divide. While in Tokyo, Snow saw Jim Bertram, back as an adviser to the New Zealand delegation to the Far Eastern Commission, just months after leaving the same city as a liberated prisoner of war. The two had not seen each other since Ed's departure for home from Hong Kong in January 1941. Snow was now "a little heavier, with his dark wavy hair shot with grey," Bertram remembered.^[27]

Ed was back in the States by the spring of 194-6—a year that ushered in a key turning point in his personal life. In New York, at an after-theater party given by actors, artists, and writers for Russian war relief, he met Lois Wheeler. It seemed a classic "across a crowded room" attraction between the young actress and the older returned war correspondent and prominent Red Star author. Lois, a Californian from Stockton, had come to New York with a scholarship to the prestigious school of acting, the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she also studied dance under Martha Graham. At the time Ed came into her life, Lois recalls, she was playing a leading role in the Moss Hart comedy hit Dear Ruth . She and Ed were fully occupied with their different careers but saw each other frequently throughout the following months. when Ed returned

to Europe early the next year on a Post assignment, Lois was in the Broadway production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons , the award-winning play that put Miller on the road to worldwide acclaim. At the end of her contract she joined Ed in Paris; they spent the summer driving through much of the war-torn Europe of 1947. Later, back in New York, she became a founding member of the Actors Studio and worked there with such distinguished directors as Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. She continued work in theater, films, and television into the 1950s, until McCarthyism slowly stifled her career.

Lois Wheeler's father had been the mayor of Stockton for a couple of terms and, according to Lois, "a strict Catholic, a Republican, and a bon vivant until he lost all of his money in the crash." He was "a stern and loving father of his four children, and especially about me, endangered by the villains I would meet in New York's theater world." Her mother was ill through much of this time, adding strains on the family. Lois, her brother, and two sisters were educated in Catholic schools, the girls in a convent. ("It's taking the rest of my life to get over that!" Lois recently wrote me.) She worked her way through the College of the Pacific (in Stockton), "jerking sodas and modeling in a local store." The college had an excellent drama department, which "turned me on for life."^[28]

In Europe, Ed was plagued by a flare-up of his old kidney infection and spent weeks in the summer and fall of 1947 in two extended hospital stays in Berne, Switzerland. Doses of the newly developed antibiotic, streptomycin, probably saved him from loss of a kidney, but the infection would never be eradicated—"a stubborn and resourceful little beast," he wrote of the offending microbe to the Post foreign editor, Martin Sommers.^[29]

Once more in Paris at the end of that year, Snow unhappily surveyed the shambles of his visionary hopes for the postwar world. (The kidney problem did nothing to lift his spirits.) His earlier concept of an America of "truer democracy" setting the pace for a collaborative new order to include the liberated colonial peoples and a more secure and thus more agreeable Soviet Union had gone the way of an escalating global cold war. Most of the world, and "you and I," he wrote his friends from Baguio days, the Crouters, are "caught between the U.S. and Soviet rivalry for power. I see no happy outcome to it." Whether America now took an interventionist or isolationist path, he foresaw "years of rearmament and war economy for everybody." Meditating pessimistically on these prospects, he grappled again with the relationship between political rights and economic justice, between his Western-rooted democra-

tic-individualist ethos, and his sympathies for the social liberationist goals of an authoritarian revolutionary left.^[30]

Americans can "talk and organize and act on the basis of rights which didn't exist for the common folk even as recently as two hundred years ago," he told the Crouters. And rights once taken away were never voluntarily restored. "So one has to inspect very carefully" the benefits offered in exchange for surrender of these rights to a minority, whatever its claims. But, Snow added, for more "backward countries" with no history or experience of such freedoms, "it's obviously a gain if they win a certain amount of economic democracy by means of exchanging one political dictatorship for another." However, Snow then struck a theme that ran through his prewar diary notes, "There is not now and never has been, any instance of the minority in power ruling in such a way as to help the g.n. [greatest number] at the expense of its own interests," nor to fail to "preserve its own monopoly of power, in terms which seek to convince the world that it is all being done for the good of the g.n." In effect, Snow recognized, there could hardly be true "economic democracy" without its basic political component. (In fact, of course, democracy had been a continuing, if unrealized and variously interpreted, rallying cry of the modern Chinese revolutionary movement since Sun Yat-sen.) Nevertheless, Snow persisted, had he been a Russian in 1917 or a Chinese now, for example, "I would probably be a communist" (i.e., a revolutionary), since in each case "the political experience of the nation was one of violence, despotism, and dictatorship." But for the real (American) Snow, the idea of a "minority dictatorship" of whatever stripe was "anachronistic and retrogressive." Americans, while holding fast to their political freedom, should make their "imperfect" economic democracy the "target of progress," he believed. (Imperfections in political democracy would soon concern Snow more closely, as America entered a decade of antisubversive loyalty probes, purges, and blacklists.) All in all, it seemed, the path to the betterment of humanity remained an extremely tortuous and rocky one.^[31]

Earlier, after the Nazi surrender in May 1945, Snow was still looking toward the future in Europe with hope. "In contrast to practically everybody else," he wrote the Random House editor Saxe Cummins from Paris, "I am an optimist about the next twenty years in Europe .... We will get along with the Russians, despite all the wails you hear at home and over here, because there is really no very fundamental basis for serious conflict." Russia's "internal needs," he went on, would be "her prime interest and concern" for a long time to come. But by 1947, in the

spirit of his remarks to the Crouters, Snow was dismally recording, "I am almost resigned to the inevitability of a Soviet-American war," a prospect for which he began to put at least as much blame on Moscow's intransigence, "blunders," and "methods of forced unanimity and dictatorship," as on American anti-Soviet moves.^[32]

Nonetheless, Snow felt impelled to stand against the rising anti-Soviet tide in America, with its high risk of catastrophic superpower war, and its antirevolutionary connotations for Asia and elsewhere in the world. Before leaving Russia in late 1944, he had had a long confidential talk with Maxim Litvinov, former Soviet foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, and now a vice-commissar for foreign affairs, and a sophisticated diplomat with much more experience in dealing with the West than the hard-liners in control in the Kremlin. Snow asked the pessimistic Litvinov if there was any way to "open doors" and dispel "suspicion and distrust" between Russia and the West. "What can a writer do," he queried, "to try to make the thing work and to try to avoid things getting worse and leading to more war?" It was a credo Snow tried to follow despite all the disillusioning developments and intensifying political pressures of the postwar years. The power holders everywhere were beyond the reach of a writer and seemed disappointingly impervious to his prescriptions and aspirations for a peaceful and constructive world order.^[33]

He wrote a series of articles for the Post in 1947 (incorporated into a book by Random House) to convey, in his characteristic intermediary pattern, understanding of how "Ivan" looked at the world and to advance the thesis (expressed in his 1945 letter to Saxe Cummins) that "Stalin Must Have Peace." (Snow had worked on the articles in the final weeks of 1946 at the well-known Yaddo retreat for writers, artists, and composers near Saratoga Springs, New York. His stay, as one of the working guests at this endowed center, had been arranged through Smedley, a frequent guest there.) In presenting his version of the Russian point of view, Snow included his own critique of postwar American policies (such as Washington's at least indirect support of Western European efforts at colonial reconquest in Asia, and American backing of Chiang in the unfolding China civil war) that ran counter to his concept of a world in revolutionary change. To underscore his theme on the Russians' desperate need for peace, Snow recounted the appalling experiences and horrendous human and material losses to which he had been witness during the Soviet struggle against Hitler. (In one of history's odd twists, the enormous casualties sustained to save the Soviet Union

would not be fully recognized in the West until after the collapse of that state nearly half a century later.) Snow replayed his I941 projections for the postwar world order, with America again in the vanguard. We "need an active policy to promote a co-operative world," he affirmed. The United States, now by far the world's mightiest military and economic power, should take the initiative, seek common ground with the Russians, work for mutually beneficial and attainable agreements (using Big Two summitry), offer major credits for the reconstruction of the U.S.S.R. (and other Allied nations), and promote bilateral cultural, educational, and scientific exchanges. International (collective) security arrangements should prevail over a new arms race. Needed social change "can be reconciled in a no-war world." His aim had been, Snow wrote in a 1949 letter, to suggest a program by which "we [America and Russia] could work together to stabilize peace in a progressive world." But Snow was clearly pressing against powerful currents at home and developments abroad that were moving in quite opposite directions. "To be a best seller [the book] should have been called SMHW [Stalin must have war] in these days," he sardonically told the Crouters.^[34]

Snow's Stalin articles provoked a political firestorm back home. As the Post editor (and lifelong Republican), Ben Hibbs, later recounted, "I knew when we scheduled the Snow articles that we would be subjected to the most savage criticism, and we were. Despite our almost weekly denunciations of Communism and all its works, we were labeled a Communist publication." The "uproar went on for months." Even so, Hibbs stated, "given the same set of circumstances, I'd do the same thing again. We failed, but we did make our try." Snow's plea for a more conciliatory approach to the Soviets was in many ways a last-ditch attempt to revive his notion of a benignly activist America using its mighty power to "wage peace" in the world. His efforts were evidently no better received in Moscow. Snow's renewed tries that year for a Russian visa were turned down. ("Well, well, the old fight," Ed noted.)^[35]

Snow had been equally unsuccessful that year in his one meeting with Truman. Ed had sought to restore with Truman the intermediary-confidante role he felt he had previously established with Roosevelt. "I would like to volunteer my services to the President while I am abroad for the next year, if I can be of any slightest help to him" he had written the White House in requesting the appointment with Truman. In their talk, Snow hoped to impress on the president that for the peoples in countries emerging from feudalism, the struggle was primarily one for human equality and not necessarily for political freedom as Americans

knew it. Snow argued that the Soviet system, though certainly a dictatorship, had brought "some benefits" to the Russian people. But for his feisty Missouri compatriot, a dictatorship was a dictatorship. "It doesn't make any difference to the man whose head is under your heel," Truman pithily told Ed, "whether you think it's done for his own good." (Roosevelt had "picked the right time to die," Truman confided to Snow. "All the headaches and difficulties I face now would have existed just the same if Roosevelt had lived.")^[36]

Moscow's rejection of any Soviet bloc role in the Marshall Plan, the creation of the Cominform successor to the Comintern, the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in early 1948, and Stalin's excommunication of Tito that year would be further blows to Snow's argument. He had left Paris for India in December 1947 (and would be in New Delhi when Gandhi was assassinated). His diary entries while in India and then Burma reveal a growing, even extreme pessimism on the state of the world. In a conversation with a leftist acquaintance in Rangoon, Snow rejected her attempt to pin him down on where he stood in a "two-camp" world. Snow testily replied that "Russia had divided the world into two camps but unfortunately there were many camps." He "didn't like camps in general," he added, always on guard against efforts to pigeonhole him politically. More broadly, Snow was now perceiving the Soviet role in Europe as a "New Imperialism." "There was just a chance we might have influenced Soviet policy at one time," he recorded, "but it exists no more and only by war." In a "neo-isolationist" reversion to some of his pre-Pearl Harbor views, he opined, "America's policy should be one of 'Democracy in One Country,'" a play on Stalin's earlier "Socialism in One Country" thesis.^[37]

On the personal side, Snow's divorce proceedings took on greater urgency as his relationship with Lois developed but remained unresolved and seemingly stalemated. (He had had a "fruitless" four-hour session with Helen's lawyers in New York in December 1946, before he left for Europe.) Well over another year would pass before the divorce was finally granted on May 17, 1949, in New Haven; Lois and he were married on May 26. Still, despite its lengthy and acrimonious character, the divorce suited both Helen and Ed at that juncture of their lives. For Helen it was the opportunity to be free, as she saw it, of "baby-sitting" Ed—"to be alone and write all my books," clearly her first priority. For Ed, in his midforties, it was the chance for the warmly secure domestic life he now found in marriage to Lois Wheeler and the birth of their two children, Christopher and Sian. (To Helen's way of thinking, Ed "wanted

to marry someone who would think he was wonderful.") Lois was no less strong-minded and determined than Peg but was clearly of a vastly different temperament and style. Though his life was now much "tamer" than the tumultuous China years, Snow would write Bertram in 1952, "it is a life of fulfillment in a personal relationship between a man and a maid."^[38]

Away from these personal matters, Snow took up the Tito-Stalin break in an important Post article at the end of 1948. He emphasized that the "Tito heresy" had undermined Soviet assertions of a two-camp world, with the Yugoslavs a portent of a "third camp" of rival "communist-socialist" states outside Moscow's orbit. Snow noted that he had discerned this possibility a decade earlier in China, where the Communists had their own army, territory, and administrative responsibilities. (He would pursue this premature Titoist-Maoist-style view of the new China in another Post article the following year.) Snow's Tito article was the most forceful exposition of his national-Communist thesis, his long-held aversion to Moscow's domination of the world Communist movement, and his disdain for the unquestioning subservience of the Communist parties in the West to the Kremlin. "What is beginning at Belgrade," he declared, "is not the dis-integration of socialism and communism as a world force, but the repudiation of Russian dictatorship over it." In the end, "repudiation" and "disintegration" would be much more closely and devastatingly linked than Snow envisioned.^[39]

Though Snow condemned Stalinist tyranny at home and within the Eastern European satellite states, he stuck by his earlier thesis—now divested of his visions of global partnership in pursuit of international amity, security, and progress. "Now, even more than a year ago," Snow contended, "Stalin must have peace, must view the outcome of a major war as filled with the most profound uncertainties and seek to avoid or delay it." The Soviets, much too weak militarily and economically to challenge the West, were thus ready to settle for the empire they already had in Europe—which was proving troublesome and unreliable enough. "Unless we attempt to drive Russia from eastern Europe by force," he argued, "there will be no general war between us in the foreseeable future." But it was now a bleakly negative picture of that future. The Russians were "very good chess players" and would bide their time. "Just now the stronger pieces are not on its side of the board." They must play for a "peace by stalemate—a "cold armistice" he termed it.^[40]

In a letter written from New York nearly a year later, Snow still defended his 1947 proposals, rather dubiously contending that the United

States might have "weakened" the influence of the hard-liners in the Kremlin—a return to the theme of his 1944 talk with Litvinov. However, the dual triumph of "reaction in our own country," and of the equally reactionary "great-Russian" chauvinistic wing of the Politburo had closed that narrow window of opportunity. Snow held on to at least a residue of his long-held belief that the "better" America would yet prevail at home and abroad. "The defects in our society at home are reflected in the lack of a more enlightened leadership than we can offer to the world." But America's unparalleled power had thus far been used with much greater restraint than would have been the case with others— whether "Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese militarists, Soviet Russia, Great Britain or France." Seen in this perspective, Americans should not "despair of doing something better for the world" than they "have accomplished to date."^[41]

Snow's concept of a "cold armistice" (coexistence?) East-West standoff for a divided Europe, and his belief in a "socialist-communist," non-Stalinist "third camp" outside the Soviet orbit, became the dual linchpins of his world view as the cold war intensified in the 1950s. The latter part contained the crux of his thinking: leftist revolution remained the order of the day in the colonialist or semicolonialist (or third) world, and America need not fear or oppose it. Given their nationalist character and interests, such revolutions, particularly the Chinese, would not necessarily extend Soviet power but could in fact (particularly with wise American policy) act as barriers to such expansionism.

In April 1949, on the eve of Red victory in China, Snow spelled out these points in a Post article—to which its editors felt it necessary prominently to attach their disclaimer. "After a dozen years of firsthand study of China," Snow wrote, "I concluded that Soviet Russia would not hold effective domination over the extremely nation-conscious Chinese Communists." China was the first colonial or semicolonial country in which Communists had won power, he noted. And though China's Marxist leaders had always "in theory" been internationalists, "In practice they have been nationalists continuing an independent movement." (Snow here seemed to veer away from his earlier more complex view of the dialectical interaction of internationalist and nationalist elements in Chinese communism.) Mao, Snow declared, "is the only communist leader—Tito excluded—who has publicly criticized Moscow's agents." Snow listed all the factors of the CCP's essentially self-reliant, China-focused revolutionary experience and policies under Mao, and of Stalin's evident wartime and postwar preference for dealing with and supporting the

Kuomintang rather than the Communists. Now Moscow "must deal with a major foreign power run by communists possessing all the means of maintaining real equality and independence." Still, Snow warily added, it would be "illusory" to expect the Russians to repeat the mistakes that had cost them Yugoslavia. "They will proceed with extreme caution, hopefully waiting for the Americans to make the blunders on which their own success could be improvised." In the long run, however, the CCP "cannot and will not subordinate the national interest of China to the interests of the Kremlin." If American policy "is washed clean of interventionism, history may evolve along lines for which all the necessary preconditions now exist. China will become the first communist-run major power independent of Moscow's dictation."

Snow posited twin probable consequences of such an eventuality—both of which would indeed come to pass. Peking might become "a kind of Asiatic Moscow, an Eastern Rome preaching Asiatic Marxism out of Moscow's control." But it might also "set up a frontier against the expansion of Communism as an extension of Russian nationalism in the East—a barrier as effective as that erected at Belgrade in the West." The era of colonialism was over in Asia, Snow concluded, it was much too late to restore empire there. "Too late for Russia as well as any other power." (Using Russian and Chinese archival sources, a 1993 study of the Mao-Stalin relationship after the new Sino-Soviet alliance of February 1950 concludes, much as in Snow's 1949 analysis: "Mao did not intend to allow China to become Moscow's satellite.... From Mao's point of view, his alliance with the Soviet Union would only be a first step toward reestablishing China's rightful place in the world.")^[42]

But, as Snow saw it, there would be "blunders" and "miscalculations" enough to go around—American, Russian, and Chinese. It would take decades more, and much calamitous conflict in Asia, before Snow's projections would work themselves out in Sino-American understanding, in which, appropriately enough, he would be a highly visible participant.

Meanwhile, Mao's China moved swiftly to join the Soviet camp, as an era of unrelieved hostility between the United States and the new China ensued. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 (which Snow had not "the slightest doubt" was begun by Soviet-supported North Korea) locked in the antagonism. Washington intervened directly in the Taiwan Straits, collided with Chinese forces in Korea, and gave full military and political support to the Chiang regime on Taiwan as the legal government of all China. Snow's views on longer-term be-

nefits to the United States of a revolutionary but nationalistic China were definitely out of favor. Instead the "loss" of China consumed American politics, with its consequent McCarthy-style attacks on the China hands, including Snow. And Ed's Titoist-type speculations were no more welcome in Peking (nor of course in Moscow), at a time when Mao was principally concerned to dispel such Stalinist suspicions of him. Snow was beginning to feel himself "persona non grata in all camps."^[43]

In a gloomy 1951 assessment for the liberal Nation (to which he now began to contribute with some frequency), Snow presented an apocalyptic vision of "undeclared war" on a global scale. Spurred by its massive Korean War-triggered military buildup, America's anti-Communist objective would move from containment to "liberation"—of China, Eastern Europe, and Russia itself. He pictured a counterstrategy of Soviet-Chinese backed revolutionary civil wars everywhere challenging and embroiling America in ineffective and costly interventionism in defense of the status quo. He now saw the Chinese Communists as willing and loyal partners in a "Eurasian Communist axis." Whereas he once stressed the potentialities of a Red-ruled China as a barrier to Russian expansionism in Asia, he now tellingly described China's southern border with Indochina as "the periphery of the Soviet empire," with China the Asian player in the revolutionary strategy of the Communist bloc. Though the Chinese were not "slaves of Russia," Snow commented further in a 1953 Nation book review, "Titoist possibilities are at present negligible."^[44]

In line with these somber estimates, and in a mood of pessimism edging toward futility, he had written Post editor Hibbs in December 1950 (at the height of Sino-American crisis in Korea), "I am sickened by the prospect of terrifying waste and negation into which blind power, rage and stupidity arc leading all of us, and the tragic destiny that lies ahead for mankind, and I can't take any interest in promoting this Greek tragedy to the bitter end. All I want to do is holler 'Stop?" he added.^[45]

Snow's connection with the Post (his source of livelihood) as associate editor and regular contributor was also entering on troublesome times, as the above letter to Hibbs indicated. Though he continued to enjoy the warm personal regard and support of Hibbs and of the foreign editor, Martin Sommers, the widening gap between his outlook and the unequivocally anti-Communist stance of the Post was bound to raise difficulties on both sides—aggravated by the "Communist" label being hurled at Snow from the extreme right. (Ed's name and his now "noto-

rious" Red Star came up frequently in the inquisitorial congressional hearings of the day, but he was never hauled before any of these committees.) The furor over his 1947 Stalin "peace" articles for the Post had already been a warning sign. A peculiar episode early in 1948 was a further one.

In India, Snow had written for the Post one of his most memorable pieces (referred to in chapter 5) on the legacy of the assassinated Gandhi. Rather oddly, the Post editors had inserted after Snow's remarks on Gandhi's acceptance of the role of the state "as a necessary instrument in achieving social democracy," the addendum, "though democracy as he understood it was certainly not to be confused with the kind of police state ruled by the Kremlin." Snow reacted angrily to Hibbs at such editorial tampering with his copy without his approval. He was particularly incensed at what he regarded as the gratuitous and jarring intrusion of such "worn and banal" cold war buzz words in an article designed as a paean to Gandhian nonviolence in a "message" to a war-bent planet. More specifically, Snow bridled at being associated with the cold warriors now dominating the media. In a less heated follow-up letter to Hibbs and Sommers from Rome, Snow somewhat tortuously explained his strong reaction to the "police state" insert. To present his readers with this phrase, "as a final verdict against a country I have tried to be sympathetic with and tried to explain in friendly terms in your columns in the past, makes me appear to be a rank hypocrite?' There was always an unreal quality in Snow's perception of his "friendly" stance on the Soviet Union, perhaps most especially in those early postwar years. To the Kremlin, it was not standard "imperialist" anti-Soviet rhetoric (or the absence thereof) in Snow's writings that was of any great consequence. Ever since Red Star days, Moscow had regarded Snow as a dangerously subversive prime propagator of what would come to be called America's "China card" strategy. Snow himself told Sommers in March 1950 that, despite the repercussions in Russia and China, he was "very glad" he had written his Tito and China satellite articles: "they are among the best I have done."^[46]

Hibbs quickly acquainted Snow with the realities on the American scene while Ed had been abroad. To put it "bluntly," Hibbs wrote him, "you have been under vicious and constant attack by a lot of misguided. but determined people." He insisted that he and Sommers "have stood up and done battle for you," and continue to do so. Even in Snow's initial outraged reaction, in which he proffered his resignation from the Post , Ed added that it "does not at all affect my personal regard for you

and Marty, and all that the association has meant to me." The matter simmered down. Hibbs considered a final letter from Ed "reasonable and understanding," making him "feel a lot happier." As for Snow's "resignation," Hibbs ended the discussion, "We want you to continue with us because you are a damned good correspondent.... We just aren't interested in any Snow resignations these days."^[47]

The key issue for Snow, then and in future, was his sense of his responsibilities as a journalist—in this case, not to contribute further "ammunition" to what he saw as the forces of anti-Communist reaction and war sentiment in America. It was a moral issue that continued to plague him in his work for the Post —the more so since his responses to domestic and foreign developments were increasingly at odds. On the one hand, unfolding Soviet policies and actions only deepened his pessimistic views in that area; on the other, the emergence of Senator McCarthy by 1950 greatly heightened his apprehensions at a repressive American political witchhunt that both exploited and intensified Americans' fears of a Red threat at home and abroad.

The issue came to a head during 1950. Sommers had suggested to Ed that he do a profile for the Post on Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Vyshinsky, who had been the notorious state prosecutor of the Moscow trials of the mid-1930s in which a great many of Stalin's erstwhile leading comrades in the party, and a number of his top generals, met their doom. As Snow wrote up his material, it was a scathing indictment of those show trials and the massive purges surrounding them, and of Vyshinsky's cynical role in consolidating Stalin's absolute dictatorship over party and state. Snow dealt as well with Vyshinsky's postwar role in establishing Russian control over the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Still, there was Snow's typically interesting and much more than one-dimensional portrait of the Russian official.^[48]

But by the time Snow completed his original manuscript in March, just as the McCarthy phenomenon burst forth, he wrote Sommers that he had decided to withdraw the piece. "What kind of escapist am I, messing about in the Russian privy and ignoring conditions in my own?" As the matter went back and forth between Snow and Sommers, Ed wished at least to preface the article by parallels and warnings for an America embarking on its own (less lethal) political purges. Sommers would have none of this; he saw it as an unwarranted "apology," and there the matter rested for some months. By the late summer Snow, seemingly persuaded that McCarthy was on the run, already discredited by the Tydings Senate committee, wrote Sommers that his article (even

without its preface) "may now have some educational value instead of being merely read as support for McCarthy's opportunism." (The fact that Snow was then being paid on a per article basis, with six pieces due each year, doubtless also played its part in the final outcome.) As a concluding twist, Sommers told Snow he had heard that "practically everybody around Lake Success [the United Nations headquarters] read the piece and that almost all the comment was highly favorable."^[49]

Even before the Vyshinsky episode, Hibbs had told Snow he thought Ed "should not write any more political articles for the Post ." Actually, while the Vyshinsky matter simmered, Snow was shunted off to do travel-style pieces for the Post 's cities series—colorful places such as Flagstaff, Arizona, and Acapulco. Ironically, these were just the opportunities the youthful Snow had aspired to when leaving New York in 1928. By 1951, Ed finally really resigned as an associate editor of the Post (accepted this time). "My conscience would not let me remain on the masthead," he wrote Bertram in October 1952, "sharing responsibility for publication of material—particularly about the Far East—which I felt to be malicious, dishonest, and misleading to the American people." Once again, however, he seemed torn between his "conscience" and his ever more cynically disillusioned reaction to the trend of the world. Now, Snow added, he was "not sure I was right in taking such a sanctimonious position."^[50]

Snow continued to write occasionally for the Post up to 1956, including an article on Zhou Enlai—a straightforward, factual, and fair account of Zhou's revolutionary career, his political style and personal qualifies. To Snow's irritation, the Post rifled it, "Red China's Gentleman Hatchet Man." (Snow's own rifle had been "Mandarin in a Red Hat," he told Mildred. But to the "editorial overmind" now at the Post , "Evil has to be identified in every headline—even though it may be wholly irrelevant to the story following.") Through that decade Snow did shorter pieces and reviews for the Nation , some articles on his wartime Roosevelt conversations, a Harvard monograph on his unpublished notes on the Chinese Reds, and some lecturing. It was "a varied and somewhat desultory kind of work," he told his father in 1956. He tried his hand at short story fiction, with but limited (financial) success.^[51]

Another project Snow undertook in the early 1950s concerned Agnes Smedley's final book, a biography of Zhu De (The Great Road), which she left in draft manuscript form at her death in 1950. Snow had become much closer to, and supportive of Smedley in the last years of her life.

(His wedding to Lois Wheeler had taken place in a Sneden's Landing house where Smedley was then staying as a guest.) She named Ed her literary executor, and he worked with others on her Zhu De manuscript, editing and preparing it for publication. It finally appeared in the mid-1950s, published by the independent socialist Monthly Review Press· Before her hospitalization and death in England, Smedley had been staying with Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, her friend from China days. Snow wrote appreciatively to Selwyn-Clarke in London that Smedley was "now in the Valhalla where she said she longed to be, and able to listen to the stories of warriors who died for the revolution." "Personally," he added, "I think she would get bored with that pretty quickly and would turn to setting things right up there where the old guard and its ruling saints have been in power entirely too long." In New York, Snow movingly eulogized Smedley at a memorial meeting he organized.^[52]

For the most part, though, Snow's time was spent working intermittently on Journey , and "puttering" around their pleasant, rather stately-looking home near the Hudson in semirural Rockleigh, New Jersey, a short commuting distance from Manhattan. The Snows purchased the house in 1952, after renting a house for two years in Sneden's Landing, in Palisades, New York, a favored haven of the Manhattan cultural-intellectual set. Their Rockleigh home was just across the New Jersey state line from Sneden's Landing, and about a mile down the road. "We have [the] usual plagues of springtime and summer chores—vegetable garden, repairs, lawns to mow, etc.," he wrote Mildred in 1953. He remodeled their old barn into "a spacious, sunny, cypress-panelled studio ... where I now have my office," he proudly informed his sister. (The studio, complete with bath, was later rented out for extra income.) "We are living as we like to live and we count ourselves very lucky," Ed wrote J. Edgar in October 1953. The children, Chris and Sian, were "healthy brown savages," he told his father, and he was "very glad" they had the chance to live where "the air is dean and the open meadow and nearby woods enchant them all day long with their wonder and mysteries." While none of his writing projects brought in much money, the Snow family of four managed to live comfortably enough, though always on the financial edge with continuous cash flow problems. ("Dear Collaborator in Impoverishment," Ed began a financial account to Lois in 1959.) Court-mandated monthly alimony payments to Helen of $187.50, which Ed vigorously objected to in principle (and principal) very often went unpaid. Lois carried most of the financial burden and was an active and accomplished homemaker as well. In the early 1950s she had a good role

in the long-running Broadway hit, The Fifth Season , and then did TV work in soap operas and "thrillers." She played "a thoroughly detestable nurse" in "The Guiding Light," Ed wrote a friend in 1954. But acting opportunities eventually mostly dried up as she faced blacklisting herself. It was a "tame" existence, he told Bertram in 1952, "compared with our years of wrath, righteous battle and certainty in China and my exaggerated notions of personal usefulness during the war and immediately after."^[53]

During this domesticated and bucolic time in Rockleigh, New Jersey, the Red-hunting Hoover FBI (which accumulated a voluminous file on Ed) evidently kept him under security surveillance out of its Newark office. (During those same years Ed became quite friendly with the New Jersey governor, Robert Meyner [a Democrat], the two men occasionally playing tennis together on weekends.) On the pretext of questioning Ed about a journalist acquaintance, bureau agents arranged an interview with Snow at his home in 1953. "Mr. Snow stated substantially," they reported, "that he has never been a Communist, is not a Communist, and will never be a Communist." Snow, they concluded, "was cordial, cooperative, and apparently frank throughout the entire interview."^[54]

Essentially sidelined in his journalistic career and livelihood, and estranged from and somewhat disappointed in his erstwhile Chinese friends, Snow had much time to dwell and philosophize on the state of the world and the meaning of it all. Apropos of his continuing work on Journey , he wrote Natalie Crouter in July 1954, he was now "equipped with fewer illusions and delusions." He acknowledged that the book would not have the "youth, enthusiasm, and dynamism" of his earlier work. "Then I had just discovered that Evil exists in the world, and then I believed that people were capable of destroying it, fairly swiftly. Now I know that the quick remedies often perpetuate or worsen Evil or only give it a new form.... Then I expected too much of man. Perhaps now I expect too little of him." It was "logical and necessary to realize that good actions of today become mingled with the bad or Evil of tomorrow." This was in many ways the leitmotiv of Snow's conflicting outlook: an optimistic belief in revolutionary change and radical reform, and grave misgivings as to the inherent perfectibility of man and society.

In another 1954 letter to his journalist friend Darryl Berrigan, he cited remarks from Pearl Buck's autobiography he was then reading that had much relevance to Maoist socialist salvation crusades. "'It is dangerous to try to save people—very dangerous indeed! I have never heard of a human being who was strong enough for it. Heaven is an inspiring goal,

but what if on the way the soul is lost in hell?' This from the daughter of a missionary, is what I, the son of a Missouri printer, also learned from my brief years of evangelism in China." Nevertheless, Snow's "evangelism" would soon be getting a new jump start.^[55]

Yoko Matsuoka, a Swarthmore College graduate from Japan before the war who had become a very close friend of Snow's in Tokyo after the Japanese surrender, evidently discerned Ed's mood of detached pessimism, on a visit to his home in the early 1950s. Matsuoka, a journalist-author after the war, had worked with the foreign correspondents in Tokyo where she met Snow in 1946. She became a politically active leftist and feminist; another of those strong-minded women Snow always gravitated toward, she also became his literary agent in Japan. When she visited Ed she vigorously reproached him for his recent writings for the Post . As she narrated this encounter in a postscript to her Japanese translation of Journey , Ed "seemed extremely depressed [and] in agony," despite his happy new marriage and the birth of his first child. She felt (from her radical perspective, of course) that "some part of my belief in this man had collapsed." She trenchantly described the scene as she "blurted out" her feelings to Ed: "I was sitting in the living room of his house near New York. Snow, cradling a glass of whiskey in his hand, was silent for some time. I still recall the look of anguish in his face."^[56]

Snow finally completed, and Random House published, Journey in 1958, but despite "on the whole, excellent reviews," Ed wrote Bertram in April 1959, the book had to date sold fewer than 12,000 copies. Continuing McCarthyist influences, and China lobby and other "reactionary" attacks on the book had hurt, he added. "There is no open-mindedness here," he rather contradictorily complained, "about anyone who has a good word to say for our China friends, however true or historically well-founded it may be." He was perhaps even more disappointed to find that, at least for the moment, there appeared to be no more "open-mindedness" for the book on the Chinese side. He had sent copies to his old friends in Peking—Alley, Epstein, Madame Sun, but the silence from there was deafening. "I've had no reaction from you, IE [Epstein] or Suzie [Madame Sun] to my book," Ed wrote Alley in January 1959. "Too bad people can't get together on the broad areas in which they agree rather than quarrel mole-like in the narrow corners where their recent experience differs."^[57]

Apparently Snow's attacks on Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe and his renewed emphasis on Titoist potentialities in Sino-Soviet relations were not as yet politically correct views in China. Nor did his

somewhat indiscreet, and now politically embarrassing, recollections of his 1930s conversations with Madame Sun help. (She never trusted any Chinese politician except Dr. Sun, Snow had written of their talks. She then added, according to Snow, "I distrust Mao Tse-tung less than the others.") Snow's avoidance of any detailed discussion of the new China (of which he thus far had no personal experience), and the inclusion of his romantic interludes in various parts of the globe, probably irritated his politically oriented China friends as well. (Snow, in fact, ended his account in the early postwar years, omitting also his new marriage and life thereafter.) Alley did cryptically write Ed that he had "looked through" the book and "wished that you had been able to spend a little more time in this environment," to which Snow rejoined, "it wasn't my fault that I didn't go back years ago when I asked."^[58]

Still, Journey would be an important milestone both in reviving his China visibility at home and in preparing the ground for his return to China. He had been "deluged—well, kept busy, at least," he wrote Bertram, "with invitations to speak on radio, TV, before college and civic groups, reflecting among thoughtful people a real hunger for knowledge about a land that by now is as remote from most of us as Cathay of olden times." And in making the case again that the Sino-Soviet relationship did not preclude but instead presented opportunities for a more positive American China policy, Snow was actually setting the stage for his invitation to Peking in 1960. Perhaps not unlike Red Star Snow was putting forth a thesis the Mat) leadership was itself not yet ready to enunciate or endorse. China "was not ours to have and hold in the 1940s any more than it is Russia's today," he wrote. He then devoted four full pages to a recycling of the key portion of his 1949 Post "China Satellite" article. Now, he asserted, "few students would deny the validity" of that analysis. (There were, of course, no further references in Journey to Snow's own Korean War-era description of China as part of the Soviet empire.) "China manifestly has become not only Russia's political peer but is in her own right, and for the first time in modern history, one of the four major powers of the earth." However, Snow argued, America's continued activist pro-Chiang interventionist policies against China had overlaid the latent "contradictions" between China and Russia and "constantly improved [America's] position as 'Foreign Enemy No. 1' of the new republic." A necessary and realistic change in such policies, Snow insisted, would instead bring to the fore, in his 1949 words, the "Contradictions between the aspirations of the Chinese Communists and Russian nationalist expansion." It was a point (devoid

of its Titoist connotations) the Chinese Red leaders themselves would shortly be transmitting through Snow.^[59]

On the larger world canvas, Snow pursued the Taoist theme of the interwined dichotomy of good and evil he had earlier raised with Natalie Crouter. He saw both Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and American interventionism in Asia in this light—characterizing both as examples of what he called "the new `imperialisms.'" The Soviets thus played "dual roles as liberator and jailer, as revolutionary and exploiter, as generous comrade and Ivan the Terrible, the vengeful father-punisher." He again went back to his prognostications of 1949 on the Titoist heresy as "the dawn of a new heterodoxy in the world Communist movement"— a process "delayed by savage Stalinist repressions in Eastern Europe, but still going on today."^[60]

In Asia, America "verbalized for national freedom everywhere but followed practices which were now pro-independence and now pro-overlord, now liberator and now ally of dictators," Snow wrote. In few cases did the United States openly assist in, or show "notable comprehension" of, the postwar anticolonial revolutions that swept through Asia. Citing here America's role in support of France's failed attempt to reconquer Indochina, Snow concluded his chapter: "In the end it was the French who left, the natives who stayed, and the Americans who paid—and are not through paying yet."^[61]

In the face of unwinnable thermonuclear war, Snow saw the cold war moving into a less dangerous stage of "competitive co-existence," which he defined as a global competition between the social systems of East and West. He harked back to the notion of his 1948 aphorism on "Democracy in one country" for America. "No foreign policy is greater than the success of the domestic system which inspires it," he concluded, "and during America's pursuit of cold war aims abroad grave questions have piled up in alarming proportions at home"—education, racism, alienated youth, public health, and more. "For all of us today it is a time for every nation to cast out the beam in its own eyes before seeking out the mote in a neighbor's eye," he ended, eschewing foreign interventionism, American or otherwise. Snow was turning his reforming zeal inward, in a reverse image of his earlier thinking on an America that could raise itself to a "higher democracy" in the process of fulfilling a liberating mission abroad.^[62]

In the final year of what had been for him the professionally and politically bleak 1950s decade, Snow was back in the Far East (though not China) as the social science teacher for the 1959-1960 round-the-world

schoolyear junket of the International School of America. Still financially "broke," Snow had accepted the offer expecting that it would also give him the opportunity to renew contacts in Asia and do some articles along the way, and possibly a book on his return. In part to cut living expenses, Lois and the children relocated to a friend's house in Switzerland they rented for that year and sublet their home in New Jersey. With more and more of Snow's writing assignments now coming from European newspapers and magazines, this would become a permanent Snow "exile" from America, though with frequent trips to and continued work connections in the States. The Snows later purchased and renovated an old farmhouse in the scenic village of Eysins near Geneva. It would be the site of Snow's final illness and death.^[63]

There was a poignancy on this eve of a new decade, just before the spin of the wheel of world politics reconnected him with China. In Hong Kong, while on his International School trip, he stayed with Peggy and Till Durdin but otherwise felt alone, adrift, and without friends there. He brooded on his next birthday, "(good God!) 55," and wondered whether he would ever get to China again. "Tonight I felt suddenly tired, desolate, old, remote, without a person to whom I could communicate," he jotted in his diary. "Could I work again in this world?"^[64]

Chapter 15
Return to China

Snow made his first attempt to revisit China shortly after the Communist victory in 1949. He sent his request to Beijing (addressed to Mao) through his peppery old colleague of Indusco days, Chen Hansheng. The latter, then living in New York, was to return to China in 1950 to live and work under the new regime. As Snow later told it to Alley, he had sent word by "safe hand of Hs [Hansheng]," but "I never heard a beep out of old curmudgeon Hs for years after he returned—to this day [1959] in fact." This silence was hardly surprising in view of Snow's unwelcome writings at a time of the firmly anti-imperialist Sino-Soviet alliance, and of the intense anti-American upsurge in China that accompanied the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.^[1]

In 1955 Snow tried again with another letter to Mao. It was seemingly a more auspicious moment. The Geneva conference on Indochina that year, with Premier Zhou Enlai attending and Secretary of State Dulles as an observer, had worked out an interim settlement of the conflict there—despite Dulles's notorious refusal of a proffered Zhou handshake. Then came ambassadorial-level talks between the American and Chinese sides in Geneva (and later in Warsaw). Snow was then advancing his thesis that the specter of the H-bomb was inevitably mutating the cold war into "competitive co-existence." Though the Geneva talks were going slowly, "talk is better by far than killing and the more things are settled by the former the less likelihood there is of the latter," he wrote Alley in September of that year. "Judging rumors hereabouts," he added, "it may soon be possible for American correspondents to visit China again."^[2]

In the letter to Mao a couple of weeks earlier, Snow "wondered why I never received from you any reply to my letter several years ago," though he had been "assured at the time" that the chairman had received it. He now thought, he told Mao, that he could do some "useful reporting based on personal investigation and inquiry undertaken with the freedom accorded me when I wrote Red Star Over China." (Snow was obviously reminding Mao of the benefits of that book to the Chinese Reds, while holding out the prospect of a new Red Star .) Should Mao "care" to accredit him to gather material for articles and a book, Ed continued, "I have hope that the State Department might soon waive its ban and validate a passport for me for the purpose." But it would take another five years, and some involuted special arrangements by both Beijing and Washington, to make his trip possible.^[3]

Snow did receive an invitation (of sorts) from China in 1957. Early that year, in what would be an odd episode, he was invited by the vice-chairs of the Chinese Writers Union and of the Chinese People's Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to come with his family for a stay of indefinite duration. The letter was sent along to Snow by Alley, who cryptically noted, "Enclosed please find an invitation to come here with your family when you are able." Snow replied that the timing was inconvenient. "Right now all I can say is that as soon as I have completed work here [principally on Journey ] ... I shall proceed to the Far East as soon as possible." He would "be happy" to see them in Beijing, he added, and would write again in a few weeks, as soon as he worked out arrangements in America to cover expenses.^[4]

Snow heard nothing further in response to his letter or to one he sent a couple of months later. We can only speculate that the invitation had been a spin-off from the dramatically liberalized climate of the early months of 1957, particularly in cultural-intellectual circles, under the Mao-initiated policy of "letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend." It would come to an abrupt end with the repressive anti-Rightist crackdown that followed. Yet during that year the Chinese also began to take a more overly independent, and critical, stance toward Moscow—perhaps the more operative factor in the gesture to Snow.

In December 1957, in reply to various queries from Snow, Alley seemed to encourage Ed by suggesting vaguely that he contact one of Beijing's embassies abroad "and everything will be done to make the trip a comfortable and easy one." The next month (almost a year after receipt of the original letter) Snow wrote his two thus far unresponsive Chinese

"hosts" that he was "now anxious to accept your invitation" and proposed a mid-March arrival for a three-month stay.^[5]

Snow then wrote Alley, outlining a plan for his trip which, "I wish you to take up, if possible, with Suzie [Madame Sun] or someone on a level where it can be dealt with positively." Central to his proposal was "a long frank interview with chu-hsi [Chairman Mao] himself," which could "possibly prove as important in breaking new land in international relations as the one I did 22 years ago." But Alley now obviously fended Snow off. "Sorry I'm such a weak reed in the matter of helping you out," he finally told Ed in June. "Everyone is so busy, and I see very few anyway." At long last, Ed was beginning to get the message. The "winds seemed to have veered again," he told Alley in January 1959, "as I've had no response from you or others I've queried" on his hopes for a "look see" at China. This was "too bad," since there was now "a wide audience ready to listen" to a Snow report. (He was being "deluged with invites to talk about Chungkuo [China]," he impressed on Rewi.)^[6]

Journey may have played some part in delaying Snow's return to China (as he tended to think), though in the longer term it probably helped to bring him there. The time was simply nor quite ripe for a visit, with the upheavals of the Great Leap in 1958, and Sino-American brinkmanship in the Taiwan Straits that year. And in truth, Snow faced equally serious barriers in America. "As far as China goes," he informed Alley in mid-1958, "the passport obstacle remains and in turn creates a financial stalemate also." Nonetheless, Snow's points on the benefits his trip might bring China were evidently getting through in Beijing. Alley would shortly be the designated front man for China in a genuine invitation to Snow.^[7]

For the while, Snow continued to see himself as out of favor on both sides of the Pacific. "Well, so much the worse for them," he confidentially groused to Bertram in the spring of 1959, "on balance I suppose it would not be far wrong to say that (quite apart from where my long-range sympathies dearly lie) my feelings through this whole wasted decade has been a plague on both their houses." He added, though, that his major disappointment by far was with "my own countrymen's inability to rise above the terms of the conflict offered by the other side." Beyond this, he also told Bertram, it was "amazing that I should still find China so much in mind even after purging myself" through Journey .^[8]

Strangely enough, news that Snow was now "persona grata" in China would come to Ed through Bertram. It would mark another turning point for him from the "wasted decade" of the 1950s, revive his role as a

significant player in the international arena, reactivate his "long-range sympathies" for revolutionary new China, and give him his always coveted opportunity to help his compatriots "rise above" the rigid Sino-American hostility and conflict of the previous decade.

As Snow's International School assignment began to wind down in Europe in the spring of 1960, and while still in the doldrums on his future China prospects, he received unexpected news from New Zealand. Alley was on a trip there and had asked Bertram to pass along to Ed his (Alley's) "personal" invitation to Snow to come to China as soon as possible as his "private guest" for a three-month stay. Snow cabled back his reply: "Please tell Rewi I am anxious to accept."^[9]

Snow could come as a "writer," Bertram told him in further exchanges of letters, and it would of course be up to Ed to secure state department clearance. It was evident that, even using the "private" Alley-Bertram channels, his request received approval, as Snow later wrote, "only after reaching the highest level of authority." As he further noted, the Yugoslav and other Eastern European Communists in Beijing "were keenly interested in my admission to China in 1960. They attached significance to it as a straw in the wind of increasingly unfavorable weather in Sino-Soviet relations." Only the state department seemed unaware of such nuances and "did everything to compel me to go to China illegally, if at all." Still, after much back and forth with the Washington bureaucrats, Snow's passport was grudgingly validated for China. In an arrangement worked out between Bennett Cerf of Random House and Gardner Cowles, publisher of Look , Snow was accredited as a correspondent for that magazine, reluctantly accepted by the state department after determined persistence and pressure by Cowles. Since Look "was one of the organizations authorized to send a correspondent to Communist China," Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Berding wrote Cowles Publications in June 1960, "the Department has no alternative other than to eliminate from his passport the restriction relating to Communist China." (The department was "completely unhappy with the thought that we must validate Snow's passport for travel to Communist China," an internal memo to Berding had stated.) The Random House-Look connection also provided Ed with the necessary financial support for his trip. Thus, Snow summed it all up, "Officially, I entered China as a-writer-not-a-correspondent, while in Washington I entered as a-correspondent-not-a-writer."^[10]

Once again Snow found himself on the word stage in his habitual role as a journalist-writer with special responsibilities—this time, in an

attempt to alter the frozen hostility between the United States and Red China, for what he saw as no less than the peace of the world. "To break our isolation from China was now a task in many ways as challenging as my assignment in 1936, and far more important," he wrote of his 1960 trip. "I could not refuse a chance to do a great story of some possible usefulness to history not to mention the survival of our two nations." In this same spirit, "I felt I had a responsibility to both China and America and a certain function to perform perhaps vital at the moment," he subsequently wrote Mao Zedong of the visit. "I believe," Ed also told Mao, "peaceful but competitive co-existence can eventually prevail in relations between the [two] countries."

Heightening Snow's sense of mission, his old Chinese friends exhorted him to bring "the truth" about China to the American people, as he had done for the revolution in Red Star . "I can imagine that every one you have met [in China] does expect much of you," Madame Sun wrote him as he was departing China. She urged him to have "the courage to stand for the truth," despite all the pressures he faced in the West. "Let it be said that Ed Snow helped people find the path." There was also some "cautionary-encouragement" from his old friend Anna Louise Strong. The rather awesome veteran leftist journalist was now working from her China base as an active writer-promoter of the Chinese position to the outside world. "We all hope," she wrote Ed soon after his departure from China, "that your past knowledge of China, plus your recent contacts—in which you were given more access to top people than any other foreigner has had since Liberation, will result in the kind of book that illumines a land and an epoch. You have shown the capacity to do that kind of book but even those who have the capacity do not do it often." Snow was equally intent on asserting his independent status. "I came here entirely at my own expense, as a writer," he wrote Bennett Cerf shortly after arriving in Beijing, "and shall remain as such. I am not a guest of the government," he insisted, drawing a very fine line, "but naturally entered by courtesy of the government."^[11]

It would indeed be a delicate balancing act for Snow in his role of "honest broker." "More than anyone I think you appreciate the problems which faced me in writing this book [on his 1960 trip]," he later wrote Strong. His book had been directed at "middle class Americans with little background these many years, often using euphemistic terminology to bypass conditioned reactions, and seeking objectivity invulnerable to academic attack." And there was subtle pressure from Random House as well. "I am sure that you are trying to give an honest and objective ap-

praisal in your book," his editor, Donald Klopfer, wrote Ed, "and whereas I know it will be favorable to the regime because of its accomplishments, I hope you will be able to point out some of their failures too God knows, I am not trying to influence what you write, but this book will be read by an American public, conditioned to look upon the Red Chinese as the enemy; consequently, it shouldn't be all white."^[12]

Such "objective appraisal" brought a daunting challenge. The politically charged "American imperialist" and "Red China" images were menacing ones and during the 1960s Would only become more so. Snow's own ambivalences also complicated his journalistic task. He was drawn to Nikita Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence overtures to the West, while his sympathies were with the more militant stance of a China seen as directly in the line of fire of American interventionism in Asia. As in the past he empathized with the Maoist-style social revolutionary-liberationist path for the "have-not" peasant masses of the third world. Though he was gratified to see confirmed his 1948-1949 projections of an independent Communist-ruled China slipping out of the Russian orbit, he was now more inclined to view this opportunity for a Sino-American accommodation as part of a larger and necessary move toward a post-cold war global East-West détente. And while he considered his primary mission to be that of prodding American opinion and policy in these directions, his thinking on his country's political attitude was far from optimistic. The United States, he believed, was now dominated by its massive "military-industrial complex" and driven by anti-Communist, antirevolutionary zeal. Given the pervasive vested interests sustained by the war economy, America's leaders were not yet capable of dramatic initiatives for peace.

"I do know," he wrote toward the close of The Other Side of the River: Red China Today (hereafter Red China Today ), "that some Chinese leaders have long been prepared to respond to a 'let us begin anew' approach by the United States. Too proud to say so directly, they were obviously hopeful that my visit might help rebuild a bridge or two: that is what they told me in various ways—always with the knowing added note that my imperialist government was not interested in bridge-building." On his return from China, Snow had just a few minutes' conversation with Dean Rusk, the secretary of state in the incoming Kennedy administration. After this cursory meeting with the busy secretary-designate, or "brief colloquy," Snow caustically commented in his book, "I was left with the impression that the Chinese had been right." Nonetheless, he foresaw an inevitable break in the Sino-American logjam. "That it will

change," he added, "that it is gradually changing on both sides, is becoming evident."^[13]

Snow's "journey of rediscovery" in 1960 was hardly comparable to his 1936 sojourn with the Red revolutionaries in Bao'an—nor for that matter, was this tired and "graying," middle-aged man of fifty-five (as he described himself to Anna Louise Strong) the adventurous young journalist of that earlier time. The 1936 talks in Mao's Bao'an headquarters epitomized the struggle of revolutionary guerrillas against the forces of Chinese state power and Japanese aggression. In the traditional imperial setting of Beijing Snow would now be meeting with Mao (and Zhou) as rulers of an all-embracing, all-powerful "people's democratic dictatorship." His five-month itinerary, from arrival (by Aeroflot from Moscow) in Beijing in late June, took him to Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, Xi'an and Yan'an in the northwest, Shanghai and up the Yangtze to the western interior heartland of Sichuan, and finally to Yunnan in the southwest, from where he left in late November for reunion with his family in Switzerland. His itinerary had been approved by Premier Zhou; there were official tour guides throughout, and interview briefings with local functionaries (cadres) everywhere. There was a private trip and conversation with the premier on his special train. Snow was also welcomed as a "friend" by "dozens" of people he had met in the Red district in 1936. Then "in their youth, ragged, hungry, so-called bandits, now the equivalents of account executives, managers, chairmen of boards, big shots." (Later, in the Cultural Revolution, Snow would label such people in Maoist terms as "Red Mandarins.") The vantage point of a regime in power—one that he viewed sympathetically—would inevitably color Snow's report. It was a perspective considerably reinforced by all his personal long-term friends in China: principally Alley, Hatem (Dr. Ma), Strong, and Epstein among the Westerners; Huang Hua and other officials who had been student friends of his in the old Peking days, Madame Sun, and that leading "big shot" among his former "Red bandit" acquaintances, the "Very High Official" at the top.^[14]

Still, here was a unique opportunity for this very special American to see and investigate the new Red China, then no more accessible to his compatriots than the remote northwestern Red base had been in 1936. Notwithstanding the obvious limitations surrounding his formal and informal contacts with a broad spectrum of Chinese in all walks of life, "I think I know more about all these people," Snow maintained, "than I could possibly have understood had I never returned to China."^[15]

Snow's "background" conversations with Mao, and his more formal interviews with Zhou were unquestionably the focal points of his stay, and its chief raison d'être. Snow received the summons to his first Mao reunion in over twenty years on a late October afternoon. He found the chairman waiting to greet him at the gate to his home in the Zhongnanhai residential compound for China's leaders directly adjacent to the palaces of the Forbidden City. (Snow compared Mao's house to that of a successful Long Island insurance salesman.) As earlier noted, Mao seemed unaware of the elementary details of Snow's post-China life, evidently including his divorce and remarriage. Mao made clear that Snow's visit, arranged (by himself and Zhou) as Alley's "guest," did not affect the continued stalemate between Washington and Beijing on the exchange of correspondents. As they thus talked before dinner, Mao suddenly thought that Alley, as Snow's "host," and George Harem, as Snow's 1936 companion and friend, should be present. In an expression of imperial prerogatives, he immediately had them summoned.^[16]

As Snow described the scene in his notes, Alley appeared in about twenty minutes. Hatem, who had been on a bus returning home after a long day's work, was whisked off by car on arrival home. He came into the room looking "rather startled, but very pleased." Perhaps equally revealing, Mao appeared quite vague about these two highly notable and resident "foreign friends" of the revolution. He had not seen either for many years, thought that Alley was Australian and that Hatem (of Maronite Christian background) was Mohammedan. More surprisingly, the Red leader asked Harem, probably the leading medical figure in the highly effective campaign against venereal disease in Red China, what he had been doing. When informed by Harem that the disease had been 'completely" erased from China (except for cases in Tibet), the chairman was surprised—he had not known that, he observed.

During and after dinner (a simple Hunan-style meal), Mao gave his characteristically unruffled, unhurried forecasts on the Taiwan question, on China's seat in the United Nations (still occupied by Taiwan), and on United States-China relations. A satisfactory (to China) resolution of these matters might take a decade or two, or even longer, but would eventually come to pass. In a typically "Middle Kingdom" view, Mao noted that China in no way felt isolated—it was after all a "United Nations" in itself of myriad nationalities and a huge population. A single Chinese province was in many cases much more populous than most member states of the United Nations.

Mao struck a number of other themes that would show up in Snow's book. He claimed great success for the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1939,

particularly in steal production. Yet he cautioned Snow on the latter's too euphoric impressions of China's advances. China remained a poor and "backward" country and would continue to be for a very long time to come. But to Mao's way of thinking, such poverty had its positive aspects. Austerity "steeled" people's (revolutionary) character—"people should know some hardship, some deprivation, some struggle," he declared. It was a premonition of Mao's subsequent cultural revolutionary attack on materialist values and priorities. To Snow's point on the middle-class character of American society, Mao rejoined in standard ideological terms that it was not the middle class but "the monopoly-capital class" that decided things in America.

To accomplish its monumental and long-term task of modernization, Mao impressed on his American friend, China needed peace and would not "pan wild" in the international arena, whether in or out of the United Nations. The United States, he added, had an equal responsibility to maintain world peace. "Taiwan," he emphasized, "is China's domestic affair. We will insist on this."

Interestingly, to Snow's query whether Leighton Smart, the last U.S. ambassador to Nanking, had offered American recognition and aid to the victorious Reds in 1949, if they renounced their ties to Moscow "in the Yugoslav manner," Mao noncommittally "affirmed that it might be so." When Snow asked for Mao's "personal reaction" to Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's personality cult, the chairman curtly put him off, referring Snow to CCP pronouncements evaluating Stalin. (Snow would question Mao more specifically in later visits on the sensitive subject of the Chinese leader's own personality cult.) According to Snow's notes, Mao avoided any direct comment on the Soviet Union or on Sino-Soviet relatious.

Snow asked the chairman (at a second briefer meeting) about the Hundred Flowers policy of 1957 and the subsequent anti-Rightist response by the regime. Mao replied that "all kinds of people came out in the press with attacks and criticisms of the party," many of them seeking to "overthrow" the government. They had been given "plenty of time" to "expose themselves," he continued. It had revealed the "minority" of "bad people" among the intellectuals, afterwards given "Rightist hats." Mao further emphasized that good people at one stage could become bad at another. Such political labeling, coming down from Mao's perch on high, cast a broad and arbitrarily defined net as it filtered down to the "struggle" levels of local party cadres fulfilling their quotas in exposing "bad" people. In 1970 Mao would rather incongruously complain to Snow about the violence that had accompanied the Cultural Revolution he had himself unleashed.

In a frank peroration on China's Communist ruling elite, Mao told Snow there had been fifty thousand Communists during the revolutionary movement of the 1920s, and only ten thousand after the counterrevolutionary killings of 1927. "Today there are about 800 survivors of all those years. By and large the country is still being run and for some time will depend upon these 800." When saying Iris final farewell to the Chinese leader, Snow mentioned his interest in doing a full biography of Mao and asked for his cooperation. Mao told Snow to settle for his Red Star biography. "Better not write my story any more," he prophetically remarked. "Developments in the future will be a hard thing to write about."

On a lighter bantering note that illustrated the many levels making up the Mao-Snow relationship, Mao handed Ed a toothpick at the end of their dinner. Snow said he thought he would keep it as a memento—"Mao Tse-tung gave me this toothpick." "Have two more," Mao laughed, handing them to Ed for his children.

The full exposition of China's negotiating stance on Sino-American issues was left to Zhou Enlai. Snow's first interview with him took place on the premier's train as they traveled on an August day to the newly completed Miyun dam north of Beijing; a second came a few days before Snow's dinner date with Mao. Taiwan continued to be the key impediment to improving United States-China relations, Zhou emphasized, in a standard statement of the Chinese position. Washington would have to cease "aggression" against China by ending its military intervention in Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits, and also abandon all efforts and policies aimed at creating "two Chinas" in whatever guise. This was an "international question" to be settled between Washington and Beijing. It was separate and distinct from the "internal" Taiwan problem to be dealt with between the sovereign China government in Beijing and the Kuomintang authorities on that island province. These were matters on which agreement should first be reached "in principle," the Chinese premier told Snow; concrete implementation. would be a subject for further discussion. There was "no conflict of basic interests between the people of China and the United States," Zhou declared, "and friendship will eventually prevail." Over a decade later, in the Shanghai communiqué marking the close of Nixon's 1972 breakthrough journey to China, the two countries would essentially concur on the basic principles outlined to Snow in 1960. Full diplomatic relations would take longer, and issues relating to Washington's "unofficial" links to Taiwan (as well as other matters) continue to ruffle and at times seriously disturb Sino-

American relations. But what Warren Cohen calls the "Great Aberration" in America's China policy would finally end.^[17]

Zhou acknowledged the existence of Sino-Soviet "differences," though insisting they were natural enough between nations. The two Communist powers remained firmly united and committed to each other's defense. On Snow's query regarding Khrushchev's abrupt withdrawal of Soviet experts from China that year, the premier blandly and disingenuously explained that this was merely normal rotation as tours of duty ended. Zhou was putting an understandable diplomatic spin on the rapidly rising but 'still publicly downplayed tensions between Moscow and Beijing and was perhaps also not yet relinquishing a "Russia card" in any negotiations with Washington. On China's disastrous post-Great Leap Forward economic crisis, Zhou conceded difficulties arising from shortfalls in agricultural output caused, he told Snow, by unprecedented natural calamities. He was otherwise silent on the severe food crisis, let alone on famine conditions, in the country.^[18]

In reconnecting with the Chinese revolution and its leaders, and in taking on what he perceived to be a mission of understanding, reconciliation and peace of global dimensions, Snow brushed aside his dyspeptic 1950s "plague on both their houses" attitude. The mission rekindled his fundamental belief in the necessity for, and liberating character of, that revolution in both national and human terms. He had come to the "new China" with a mind-set based in good part on the old China he had known, with its stark images of human misery and degradation, of bad government, and of a weak and divided nation victimized by imperialism in general and Japanese aggression in particular. In contrast, there was now an assertively independent and unified nation, with an effective government proclaiming the interests of the "have-not" majority and embarked on an ambitious, long-term program of economic and social modernization. For Snow, this was the major story he needed to tell—and one his China friends were pressing him to tell. "Going back to China was obviously not the same thing for me that it would be for any other reporter, or even for other former China correspondents," he wrote in the "testamentary" document he sent on to Anna Louise Strong at his return from the China trip. "My position was unique." No Chinese, he further stated, "would for a moment suppose me to be a Communist nor expect me to write as a Communist. Yet they do know," he continued, "that I never joined those who slandered the new regime nor cashed in with exbelievers and professional cold-war propagandists, to help deceive or bewilder the American people about the Chinese rev-

olution and its leaders." It was in this spirit and within these parameters that Snow wrote his massive account of his return to China.^[19]

Red China Today , a volume of over eight hundred pages, published in 1962, had the old Snow imprints and more: a colorful personal travelogue style, vividly and warmly depicted personalities from leaders to people in all walks of life, much material on wide-ranging aspects of Chinese life and society, solid discussions of political and economic matters, a positive focus on the regime's social and economic accomplishments and some attention to its more recent setbacks and problems. ("The material was so massive, and the subject so vast," Snow wrote Donald Klopfer of his completed manuscript, that to "make any of it comprehensible to the average reader, far more exposition and background seemed necessary than I had anticipated.") On foreign policy issues, he gave full play to his interviews with Zhou and included a long chapter on Vietnam. A concluding peroration touched all of Snow's visionary themes (his "devotions," he called them)—turning swords into plowshares, with America urged to shift from "war against peasants" to initiative in "a world war against poverty, disease, and ignorance," and for a truly internationalist world in which the "have-not" nations and peoples could find their places in the sun. With Vietnam particularly in mind, he declared that the "eyes of Washington are on the wrong places and on struggles already lost."^[20]

For its time, Snow's book was a valuable compendium of information and firsthand impressions by a non-Communist journalist with unique China credentials. It was also a sympathetic, but not uncritical, examination of how China and its people had fared under a decade of Red hale and of how its leaders looked at the world outside. Snow, with his transcendent sense of "responsibility" to help "build a few bridges" (including some of his own), was intent on "balancing" the mostly hostile, and often paranoid and racially tainted, picture of faceless Asian "ants" or hordes (a virulent mix of "Yellow" and "Red" Perils) that Americans had been given. (It was "fear of the unwelcome information I might be obliged to present," Snow subsequently wrote Grenville Clark, "which makes me what is called a 'controversial' writer, at least in the U.S.A.") Though Snow "leaned to one side" (in Mao's famous 1949 phrase), his report was still a valiant, if flawed, attempt to break through the rigid, stereotyped walls of antagonism between the two sides. If his book "raises more paradoxes than it answers, that may be an achievement," he told Klopfer. "It is, at any rate, China." Ironically, Snow's status as an invited (and supervised) "guest" of the regime (though paying

his own way) was considerably more constricting for him as an investigative journalist than the relative freedom he had enjoyed through imperialist-imposed extraterritorial privileges under a hostile (to him) government in the old China. "The fragmented China of the 1930's could be penetrated far more easily than the mobilized totalitarian China of 1960," John K. Fairbank observed of Snow's visit.^[21]

Snow's first book on China in two decades garnered (aside from predictable attacks from the fight) generally mixed reviews: highly respectful of his China credentials and connections, and admiring of his repor-torial talents, but critical of many of his judgments. He was best on the people, not the politics of China. In the nature of things it was not going to be another Red Star . Robert C. North, a Stanford specialist on Chinese communism, summed up the kinder side of this consensus: "Edgar Snow has written a powerful and engrossing book. With more discrimination and restraint and self-disciplined analyses he might have written a great one." Unfortunately for Snow, the review for the prestigious New York Times Book Review was considerably less admiring or charitable. It was written by Michael Lindsay, a British academic who had been an ardent champion of the wartime Red guerrillas and as a radio technician had worked for some time among them but who became an inveterate foe of the Beijing regime. "It is disappointing," Lindsay remarked, "that Mr. Snow, with his background and contacts, has added very little to accounts given by other foreign observers." And Snow's "intellectual development," Lindsay wrote (with his own political odyssey clearly in mind), "seems to have stopped in the 1930s when it was plausible to identify the conflict of political left and right with the conflict of good and evil." His review provoked an indignant (and probably ill-advised) Snow letter to the editor that gave Lindsay an opportunity, in a rejoinder to reinforce his original criticisms.^[22]

Still seething over the Lindsay review, and frustrated that a months-long New York newspaper strike in the winter of 1962-1963 had put a severe crimp in Random House promotion of the book, Snow was greatly cheered by an accolade from an unexpected source. "Congratulations on your magnificent The Other Side of the River' which, for the first time showed the other side of Red China to me," the popular American television impresario Ed Sullivan wrote him, "and thank you for a brilliantly rendered service to the world."^[23]

A major stumbling block for most reviewers was the perception that Snow had depicted the dictatorial Communist system in overly benign populist terms as a "poor man's government." This issue, as we have

seen, had long preoccupied Snow's own thinking, in the interplay of his "radical" and "bourgeois" sides. He had argued in 1947 that for people in "backward" or "feudalistic" societies, it was an important "gain" if they won "a certain amount of economic democracy by exchanging one political dictatorship for another." It was a point he had tried to "explain" to Truman that same year. And Snow had simultaneously argued that "there is not now and never has been, any instance of the minority in power ruling in such a way as to help the g.n. [greatest number] at the expense of its own interests." In coming back to the Chinese revolution in 1960, Snow put his emphasis on the first half of this proposition and downplayed (but did not abandon) his caveats. The People's Republic, he argued, was an exceptional case where the interests of the "have-not" majority had been genuinely advanced and protected. "China," he wrote in a preface to the Japanese edition of Jourey , "presents the example of a nation in which the poor collect from the rich under the auspices of the Communist Party." And pursuing his "exchange of dictatorships" thesis in Red China Today , he averred that in contrast to the Kuomintang's "military dictatorship" controlled by "a small have-got minority," the "Communist dictatorship has organized its bases among the have-not peasants and working people and deeply involved them in the revolutionary economic, social, political and administrative tasks of building a socialist society."^[24]

The China scholar Benjamin Schwartz, in commenting on the above points in his review of the book (which Snow privately called "very good, but critical, or critically very good") cogently questioned Snow's "poor man's government" concept. "The fact that the ruling elite [the "800" Mao had cited to Snow] owns the power to command and to make decisions (including all the decisions involving the production and allocation of goods)—the most primordial form of ownership which has ever existed—is apparently of no consequence." Such total control of power might be necessary, to the modernizing process of underdeveloped nations at a certain stage, but even in that case, Schwartz mordantly noted, there was "no need for presenting purgatory as paradise."^[25]

Underlying and complicating these fundamental issues was the inauspicious timing of Snow's account. In 1936 he had met the revolution just as it was poised for its dynamic and historic wartime surge leading to ultimate victory. He now caught up with that revolution as it was beginning to falter and had already entered what would be a protracted period of political crisis, conflict, and purges, of massive upheavals, and of dramatic shifts in leadership and direction in a process still playing itself

out. The years from the Hundred Flowers through the calamitous aftermath of the Great Leap, combined with the growing conflict with Moscow, set the stage for a decade and more that would convulse the country and nearly shatter its ruling party structure. Needless to say, Snow could neither foresee such portentous developments nor easily discern the underlying political faults beneath the surface tremors. He thus minimized the importance of Peng Dehuai's dismissal as minister of defense, stressed the CCP's unity and stability under Mao, with the chairman "thus far" free of any "megalomania," or of Stalinist "paranoia" toward his colleagues. Snow cited, as an example of this, the influential role of Liu Shaoqi, the new chairman of the republic and Mao's anointed successor as party leader. Liu, of course, would shortly be the chief target and victim of Mao's Cultural Revolution.^[26]

Snow's vision was further obscured by his basic assumptions on the "dictatorship of the have-not majority." He was no longer, as in the China of the 1930s, writing as an opponent of an existing regime who had linked himself with the cultural-intellectual and student currents of dissent and protest. He now tended to picture the critics unleashed by the Hundred Flowers as at worst counterrevolutionaries, and at best liberal Western-educated intellectuals who hankered after a pluralistic political system. The latter, Snow maintained, "had no remedy to offer except a return to the bourgeois ideology of the Kuomintang, which had already proved incapable of solving China's problems." And as for student protesters in the universities in Beijing, Snow remarked that some "demanded the right to choose their own teachers and curricula; they wanted free food for all, and no more work in the countryside." These remarks were sharply challenged in a New Republic review of Snow's book by Rend Goldman, a young China scholar of French-Polish background who studied at Beijing University during these events. As one who "shared in the exultation of my Chinese fellow students," he wrote, and who "witnessed the eagerness with which they tackled national issues, demanding such things as respect for human rights, more learning from the West and the administration of schools by teachers who were not merely party secretaries, I find Mr. Snow's patronizing objectionable." And as for the subsequent suppression of the intellectual-academic critics of the party, George Hatem, near the end of his life, privately told close friends in Beijing (among other things) that Mao's "anti-Rightist campaign took the heart out of China's intellectuals."^[27]

Snow's remarks on the incapacity shown by "bourgeois ideology" to solve China's problems spoke to a key issue that continues to bedevil

Sino-American relations. As Andrew Nathan notes in his insightful study of the theory and practice of "democracy" in China over the past century, culminating in the Communist version of "people's democraric dictatorship," there are key elements of modern Chinese political culture as well as of Communist ideology involved. In contrast to Western democratic principles, such thinking views politics "as a realm of harmony rather than antagonism between the citizen and the state, of one-party leadership, of the supremacy of the public interest over citizens' rights, and of the power of the state to make any laws it deems necessary with— out judicial contradiction." The argument made by China's democracy advocates that "a competitive party system and an independent press are necessary to allow people to control the rulers," Nathan adds, has been a rare one for China. Thus far, Nathan concludes, China's "century-long obsession with political order and national strength had made it impos-sible for most other Chinese, even non-Marxists, to share [the democ-racy activists'] visions of change."^[28]

Snow had been on both sides of the China argument. In the rime of the Kuomintang, he had urged America to "push" the Generalissimo toward liberal democratic reform. Now, in dealing with his writing; plans in the context of the "better" People's China he had seen, he recorded: "If anyone is looking for material to prove that the American system is the best system for China (including Taiwan!) and ought to be imposed on the Chinese people then I have nothing to say which would be helpful to the cause." It was hardly that simple, neither for Snow over the next decade of his involvement with China, nor for the Chinese and American leaders and peoples since then.^[29]

In recent years, particularly with the ending of euphoria (a second "loss of China"?) that had followed the Nixon opening to Beijing, Snow came in for some especially sharp criticism for his reporting on China in the 1960s. Notably singled out for attack has been his denial in Red China Today of any widespread famine during the calamitous post-Great Leap years of 1959-1961. A leading Chinese dissident, the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, later in political exile in the United States, pointed to Snow's account of the food crisis as a "telling example," in Fang's hostile view, of the American journalist as "propagandist" for the Mao regime. The American China scholar Jonathan Mirsky is also strongly critical of Snow's writings on Mao-ruled China—on the famine and much else.^[30]

"I must assert," Snow wrote of the post-Leap grain crisis in 'Real China Today , "that I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famine," and that "I do not believe there is famine

in China at this writing; and that the best Western intelligence on Chin is well aware of this." Snow went on, "Isolated instances of starvation due to neglect or failure of the rationing system were possible. Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No."^[31]

Snow's assertions were more significant for their ambiguities than a absolutes of truth or falsehood. Though Snow indeed dismissed the starvation reports coming from refugee sources in Hong Kong and widely circulated in the West, there is no evidence that during the 1960 visit he saw (or was shown) any such conditions. And given the highly exaggerated, later revised Chinese reports on grain output beginning h 1958—reflecting the frenzied, unreal, super-leftist "politics in command syndrome affecting party cadres at all levels—perhaps even the top lead ership had not yet fully recognized the true magnitude of the food crisis at local levels at the time of Snow's stay in China. Undoubtedly, great numbers of people starved to death in the most hard-hit provinces and localities, and very many millions more succumbed to the effects of sustained and severe malnutrition during what officials later called the "three bad years" of 1959 to 1961. However, there was evidently no sin gle vast region of devastation and death such as Snow had witnessed in the northwest in 1929. As John Fairbank stated in his 1986 history of the Chinese revolution, "In 1959-60 China was better organized [than in earlier famines] and famine areas full of corpses were not seen. But the malnutrition due to thin rations made millions more susceptible to dis ease. The higher-than-usual mortality became obvious when the statistics were worked out." And in his careful 1984 investigation of the famine and the factors that caused it, Thomas Bernstein notes, "The extent to which famine struck China during those years, it is important to stress, has not been fully established." While "no one doubts" the serious food crisis of that time, Bernstein adds, "famine on the scale of those that struck China during the Qing and Republican periods could have taken place has long been doubted, if only because the PRC has an effective government able to organize the distribution and transportation c relief grain." It was with demographic patterns and other data available only in the early 1980s that the full impact of the calamity has to some ey-tent emerged. Dwight Perkins, a Harvard expert on the Chinese economy, could write of the post-Leap grain crisis almost a decade after Snow's trip, that rationing and railroad construction "averted a major disaster."^[32]

The intent here is not to delve into the complex web of natural and political factors that led to the disastrous consequences of those year.,

but to assess the claim of Snow's culpability in propagating a famine version that he either knew or should have known ("what did he know and when did he know it") was palpably false. As already noted, the magnitude and severity of the crisis of 1959-1961 remained uncertain until long after that time. It is noteworthy that the major reviews of Snow's book by China specialists (including the hostile one by Michael Lindsay) either ignored or took no particular issue with Snow's treatment of the matter. Indeed, Benjamin Schwartz in his careful 1963 review wrote, "As against Mr. Alsop's predictions of mass starvation, Mr. Snow's insistence that efficient rationing has distributed whatever malnutrition there may be seems somewhat more justified at least as of the present." The truth was evidently then more elusive than some contemporary critics assert. Like others, Snow had an a priori belief in the will and capacity of the Communist government to take effective organizational measures to avert large-scale starvation, in contrast to the massive human cost of similar crises in the past. "I read your clipping from the [Kansas City] Star about 'famine' in China," Ed wrote Mildred a few months after his return from China. "There isn't any famine there in the sense that I knew it in the past, but the Chinese are having a very tough winter" owing to crop failures brought on by natural catastrophes. "Had such a year struck China in the old days tens of millions of people would now be dying of starvation."^[33]

Still, Snow was not that confident of his facts as he worked on Look articles and his book in the early months of 1961. In the face of a continuing barrage of famine stories, he sought to get at the truth from his foreign friends and official contacts in China. It was no doubt naive on his part to think that even if these sources were privy to state-guarded information and statistics on the national food situation, they would share data, particularly adverse data, with a Western journalist, friendly or not. Answers to most of his queries never came or consisted, as Alley's did, of blandly reassuring and generalized replies, devoid of hard facts and figures. A year later, with his book scheduled for publication in the fall, he continued to seek help from China. "I am doing my best to present the facts about the problems of China's agriculture as well as its achievements," he wrote Israel Epstein in May 1962, "but the absence of any concrete information makes it difficult to answer" the Alsops and others on the famine-starvation reports. Among other China matters on which he asked for "explanations," were the refugee exodus to Hong Kong and reports of high-level policy rifts in the CCP. "Do try to get me a few FACTS," he pleaded.^[34]

Withal, Snow was not quite playing the "true believer" role. As was often the case, privately he was troubled, uncertain, and irritated at what he considered to be much stonewalling by the Chinese, not only since his departure from China but while he was there as well. In a December 1961 letter to Han Suyin, a writer friend and Red China champion, Snow expressed some of these feelings. He found it difficult to "grapple" with the wildly fluctuating agricultural and industrial output reports emanating from China since 1958—on which he complained, "I was in no way helped to understand by anyone in China." He was "terribly ignorant" when he went to China, he tellingly, if exaggeratedly, informed her. "I assumed I knew something about it. I knew nothing. I still know very little." He had spent most of the past year on research he should have done "before entering the country." Snow frankly acknowledged the barriers he had faced on his China visit. "I made the mistake of supposing that I would find a few people who would speak to me frankly and honestly about matters of the recent past as well as the present." But, he continued, he was "unable to establish any such contacts With reality." Though he acquired a "mass of material," it was "meaningless" without the "necessary background and the kind of facts no one would give me. I have done the best I can to fill in the vast void."^[35]

Oh, "for the life of a novelist," he groaned to Han Suyin. Look (which had printed a first article of his based largely on the Zhou interviews) had paid for but rejected others as "biased," he told her. If they "had published what I wrote," he peevishly added, "much of it would have been considered 'hostile' in Peking." It is "a difficult time to emerge with a China book," he wrote Alley as his work neared publication in the fall of 1962, "but then I don't know when it hasn't been difficult to write about it for America since the revolution."^[36]

A journal entry Snow made while in China in October 1960 is perhaps the most revealing exposition of the conflicts and dilemmas for him as a committed but politically independent journalist-friend of the revolution writing for a broad "bourgeois" American audience. ("Why don't you nail your flag to the mast, as I do?" Han Suyin goaded him after reading his Look article.)^[37] Snow noted:

Mao said it is impossible to remain neutral and he is right—about China. Leaning to one side. I too have been leaning to one side. But not leaning on anybody....To take sides but not to lean on somebody else is more difficult if one lives in an advanced capitalist society than if one lives elsewhere. Think of all the mistakes and tragedies committed by St. [Stalin] or in St's name. Who would wish to have committed himself blindly to that dictator-

ship?...No greater error than to suppose that one's subjective actions are not part of objective reality. If one knowingly acts in accordance with what one knows to be false one is affecting the objective situation adversely not favorably. One does not always know but when one does the first obligation is to truth.^[38]

Snow's confidence in Mao, as opposed to Stalin, would be put to increasingly severe tests in the years ahead. But already, the erratic course and flawed character of the revolution in power made the "truth" he sought to discern and report dauntingly complex, ambiguous, and ultimately elusive—as his Red China Today amply illustrated.

By the time his book appeared (in 1962), Snow was much less sanguine about his attempts to open up genuine dialogue and ease the Sino-American deadlock. While still "leaning to one side," he was inclined to blame the Chinese as well as the Americans. Though he thought the American people were "interested and fairly openminded," he told Alley, "so far this has no impact on policy." The "USA has been on the wrong track for years," he added, "but China's policy has done little to help the American people as distinct from ye old American imperialist: government find a bridge to reestablish contact. If one really believes there is a difference between the two it should find realistic expression in policy." It was a typical Snow frustration—both sides were getting in the way of his efforts to promote "a new beginning."^[39]

Actually, Snow's massive book (at $10) did quite well, with American sales of over 21,000 copies. Snow was busy in the States in the early months of 1963 with lecture dates and appearances on radio talk shows and the prestigious network TV morning shows. His twelve minutes on the Today program, Random House sales people told him, was worth $50,000 in commercial advertising time. There were debating tussles on some shows with Michael Lindsay and others. On his American tours in 1962 and 1963, he wrote Mao in May 1963, he had spoken to audiences "in more than 50 universities and colleges, discussion forums, businessmen's clubs, teachers conventions and other organizations in more than 30 states." With the favorable reception he had been getting in these appearances, and the wide interest generated by his book as cases in point, Snow sought to impress on the chairman the value of "bourgeois" freedoms in the United States. "I doubt that it is realistic to say that freedom of speech and the press is meaningless in a country where information of this nature can be dispensed to the whole people, by those who possess it."^[40]

With his visibility again on the rise in America, and with his unique China connections, Snow was then being approached to intercede with

the Chinese for various prominent Americans seeking to visit the People's Republic. In particular, Grenville Clark, an eminent international lawyer and a "tireless crusader" for world peace through world law, contacted Ed on behalf of Dr. Paul Dudley White, the noted cardiologist and Eisenhower physician, and later on for himself too. Though Snow's attempts then to persuade Mao of the value to China of such contacts proved unavailing, they led to a growing friendship between Snow and Clark up to the latter's death in 1967 at age eighty-five. Snow gave warm encouragement (with important reservations in defense of the right of revolution) to Clark's goals of global federation and world disarmament.^[41]

In an approach of a very different character, Snow was hit from an unanticipated, though not surprising, source. Ex-wife Helen brought a legal action against him in New York for back alimony, effectively tying up his Random House book royalties. Fortunately for him, his European earnings were unaffected. Ed's attitude toward Helen had mellowed considerably in the years since the divorce battle, helped by her forbearance on the missed alimony payments. "I suppose I should be grateful that I don't hear from her; she has been uncomplaining recently about the defaults on alimony," he wrote Bertram in 1959. Snow had contacted Peg earlier that year, acknowledging her "patience," and giving a brief "report" on his money situation. "In short, my financial status is zero," he told her. But with his evidently brightened expectations following return from China, Ed sent Peg $500 early in 1961, with apparently implied prospects of more to come. She responded with a detailed recital of her own dire financial straits and her failure thus far to place her writing commercially. "If you can send me money this year," Helen told him, "perhaps I can do a book that will sell at last." Ed was soon forced to backtrack. "I owe you an explanation because I gave you some hope that I could renew some payments to you," he wrote her in 1961 "I was too optimistic. Things have not gone as well as I had hoped." It all hinged on the book he was working on. "If it pays anything I should be able to then." Snow was inadvertently setting himself up for trouble ahead.^[42]

Though Ed sent Helen a few hundred dollars more in the spring of 1962, he at the same time reiterated, "I wish you were correct in your belief that I am now in the dough but such is not the case." His only income the past year had come from some lecture engagements that netted him comparatively little after expenses and his agent's fee of 50 percent of the gross. "What a pity it is that you could not find a man to

please you among all the millions here," he wistfully and transparently added. Helen acknowledged the money with a cryptic, "I was very glad to get it," and then went on in friendly enough fashion to non-personal topics of mutual interest. But with the seeming success of Red China Today by the spring of 1963, Helen took action.^[43]

Snow morosely told Bertram in June that although his book was in a fifth printing in America, "I have made nothing at all there because your friend Peg has attached and claims all my earnings of those years and the case will presently go to court and provide ironic amusement for many and fees for the lawyers." Though the subsequent legal snits and countersuits were finally settled on terms that ended all further obligations by Ed to Helen, it sadly rekindled and intensified Snow's earlier bitterness toward Peg. (He brooded in his diary on plots for "justified homicide.") "Legally, I am paid off for quits," he unsparingly told Bertram, "but my God what a life sentence she made herself for me, not to say herself." Helen, of course, immersed in her unremunerative writing work, saw all this quite differently.^[44]

Snow was back in China from October 1964 to January 1965—a clear sign that his book had been favorably viewed in Beijing. ("Your case is different [from other Americans seeking entry]," Gong Peng, a foreign ministry official and friend from Yanjing student days told him during the visit. She added, "Everyone knows you are a friend of China.") Naturally enough, he found the economy, and particularly the food supply, in much better shape than 1960. As then, his visit was highlighted by dinner and conversation with Mao, and formal interviews with Premier Zhou. (A year earlier, in January. 1964, Snow had traveled to Guinea, Africa for an interview with Zhou, then visiting that continent. The text appeared in full or extract in the European press, and extract in the New York Times .) Snow sought interviews while in China with other top officials of the Beijing regime (including Liu Shaoqi), he told Allan Whiting of the state department, who spoke with Snow in Switzerland after Ed's return. But Premier Zhou "told me I had no need `to bother' these `busy men' since he could answer any questions I had, and if he couldn't, Mao could."^[45]

Snow's talk with the chairman (which he was permitted to publish in unquoted form) was, as in previous Mao-Snow encounters, a fascinating example of the Chinese leader's enigmatic but purposeful style and idiosyncratic way of thinking. Snow told Whiting that the chairman "had delivered himself somewhat pontifically, more so than in 1960, reminding me of Churchill's manner in the latter part of World War II (whom I interviewed at that time)." They met on January 9, 1965, this

time in a reception room of the Great Hall of the People that faced Tiananmen Square. Their conversation, in Mao's words, ranged from "south of the mountains to north of the seas."^[46]

Mao's remarks, it turned out, contained a number of significant signals for the chairman's American and Soviet antagonists abroad, and his backsliding party protagonists at home. He affirmed that the Vietnam revolutionary forces could win victory on their own. He insisted that China would not go beyond its borders and would fight only if directly attacked. He did not consider such action by the United States to be likely. And China, he added, was busy enough with its internal affairs. Mao saw the Americans and Chinese eventually coming together again—"that day would surely come." He specifically cited, and accepted, official American pronouncements that the war in Vietnam would not be carried into North Vietnam. Frankly, the Red leader wryly remarked, it was "a good thing" that America had its troops in Vietnam. It gave the people there an external imperialist enemy as well as an internal target to unite against—the Maoist concept of nationalist revolutionary struggle. For the Chinese revolution to succeed, he added, "a single Chiang Kai-shek had not been enough. There had to be a Japan to overrun the country for eight and a half years." (The Chinese leaders, Snow later told Whiting, "feel certain we [United States] will lose eventually and that we will make our own situation worse in the meantime without much effort on their part.")^[47]

While there would later be heavy American air strikes against North Vietnam, and Chinese economic and military assistance to Hanoi, Mao seemed to be laying out the basis of an implied understanding with the United States on the ground rules for the impending escalated conflict in Vietnam. He signaled his determination to stay clear of direct involvement; he believed that he could safely concentrate on his own domestic revolutionary agenda. He was confident that the Vietnamese revolutionaries could cope, and that in due time America would find it expedient to leave. The chairman evinced "hope" for future improvement in United States-China relations but seemed more pessimistic on prospects with Moscow despite Khrushchev's recent fall from power. The "chief difference" on that score, he whimsically commented, was that the Chinese had been deprived of "a good target for polemical articles." (On this cue, the CCP would continue to attack Soviet policies as "Khrushchevism without Khrushchev.")

Snow rather delicately raised the "personality cult" issue: the Russians had criticized Mao for it, was there "a basis for that?" Mao agreed

there was "some" and, in typically allusive fashion, noted that though Stalin had been "the center" of such a cult, Khrushchev had probably fallen because he had none at all. Mao was dearly viewing the deposed Russian leader as a "negative example" in this respect also and would soon be putting even the Stalin cult in the shade. When Snow met with Mao again in December 1970, at the height of the Great Helmsman's deification, the chairman referred a bit defensively (and mildly critically) to Snow's published references to the Mao cult. "It is you Americans who go in much for the personality cult!" he told Snow, citing the name of America's capital city as an example. Though it was all "a nuisance," there was "always the need to be worshipped." Mao toyed rather fancifully with the notion of "worship": "If no one reads your [Snow's] articles and books after they come out, would you be pleased?" It was the bizarrely exaggerated mode of discourse Mao often indulged in.^[48]

Paradoxically, while Snow was disturbed by the extremes of the Mao cult, he had been a significant accessory in the propagation of the Mao image from Red Star to his posthumous and truncated 1972 book on the Cultural Revolution. Snow summed up his assessment of Mao most strikingly in the course of their 1965 meeting. To Mao's fatalistic recital of his many close encounters with death during the revolutionary struggle, Snow responded:

Accidents of fate which spared you have made possible perhaps the most remarkable career in Chinese history. In all China's long annals I cannot recall any man who rose from rural obscurity not only to lead a successful social revolution but to write its history, to conceive the strategy of its military victory, to formulate an ideological doctrine which changed the traditional thought of China, and then to live out the practice of his philosophy in a new kind of civilization with broad implications for the whole world.^[49]

Mao, the record showed, did not demur from Snow's estimate.

In further intimations of things to come, Mao told Snow that China's current youth generation had no experience of the old society, nor of revolution. Reading or hearing about it was not the same as living it. Soon his Red Guards would be stirring up a "revolutionary storm" that would become much more than enough even for the old revolutionary warrior, who would finally return them forcibly to their (Maoist) books. The seventy-one-year-old leader told Snow that he (Mao) was soon "going to see God" (another Maoism). The future was uncertain, with rapid change the order of the day. "A thousand years from now all of us," he concluded, "even Marx, Engels, and Lenin, would probably appear

rather ridiculous." It was another illustration of Mao's style. Evidently he was thinking of a much shorter time-span and, with his own mortality in mind, had no intention of suffering a "ridiculous" fate. He would be charting a course aimed at keeping his revolution alive and on track.

When Snow asked if Mao had a "special message" that the American journalist might take back to President Johnson, Mao had none. It would take another six turbulent years before the Chinese leader had such a special message for Snow to transmit to another American president.

Though Snow's write-up of his Mao interview and other pieces on the trip appeared widely in Europe and Japan, he found difficulty placing them in America on terms he deemed satisfactory. For a "pittance," he finally "gave" the Mao story to the Washington Post , which then published it in "distorted" form, Ed grumbled to Mildred and Howard. A relatively intact version of his Mao conversation appeared only in the New Republic . He had concluded, he further complained to his sister, that it was "hopeless to try to deal with the U.S. press on China." (Even so, he had received "the best advance ever paid to me," from Macmillan, for a [never completed] book on the trip.) Adding to the strains, he had had health problems before, during, and after the China journey. In what would become the pattern for him, there had been surgery a few months before leaving, an attack of flu in China, and exhaustion from the pressures of work on his return. In March 1965 he was back in the hospital to clear up an infection.^[50]

Compounding all this, Snow's mid-1960s China journey was soon overshadowed by the rush of events. Under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson, America plunged into its seemingly endless anti-Communist crusade in Vietnam, while Mao would soon launch his "anti-revisionist" assault on his own party, government, and intellectual establishment. Snow's reaction to the first was one of outrage and foreboding; to the second, uncertainty and some early misreading of the signals from Beijing, but continued trust in Mao-inspired socialist aims. "It is good to see the Chusi [chairman] back in form," he wrote Alley in November 1966, as Mao's Cultural Revolution escalated. A few weeks later he informed Alley of a lecture tour he was embarking on in the States "where some people fancy that I know China. I detest lecturing because I know only something about not knowing, that's all; and audiences are never pleased to be told that truth." And truly, Snow in the beginning seemed to misconstrue the Chinese upheaval. In a July 1966 letter he had seen China as gearing up for expected war with America. In splitting with the

USSR, the "go-it-alone school prevailed and the country is now committed to war." In this somber mood, he declared that "China is already at war with the U.S. in Vietnam." In time China will become "the main base" of the war as it spreads throughout Southeast Asia "and eventually NE Asia," with the Chinese fighting in the manner of the earlier Red guerrillas against Japan. "Perhaps I am too pessimistic," he closed. "I hope events prove me so." Snow amplified on these points in a New Republic piece at the time, in which he judged the Cultural Revolution to be the final crackdown on those who had argued against Mao's policy of confronting the rising American threat by a self-reliant, protracted people's war strategy. He dismissed the "revisionist" charges leveled at such "veteran Communists long indoctrinated by Mao's teachings, and with a lifetime of practice in the politics of the Chinese revolution," as mere "euphemisms." The escalating American involvement in Vietnam triggered a neo-isolationist mood in Ed that harked back nostalgically to his heartland youth. "I think I liked it better when we were not trying to run everybody," he told Howard in June 1965. "I remember the twenties now as a good time when we were satisfied to be ourselves without so much preaching with bombs and so on. How did we get to play god so quickly?"^[51]

As the China scene became more chaotic and unpredictable, Snow delayed work on his new book commitments. He did shorter pieces for his European press outlets and the New Republic and spent much time (and money) putting together his China film documentary, One Fourth of Humanity . There were regular lecture engagements in the States, and a Japan lecture tour in 1968. ("In the U.S. my agent asks a minimum of $1000 for a lecture and usually gets it or not much less," he informed his German friend Anna Martens, in 1969.) The Japan journey was particularly successful. He flew there in April 1968 from Honolulu, after a strenuous American visit. His lectures, combined with showings of his China film documentary, attracted large audiences in all the major cities. He "interviewed and was interviewed by" editors, professors, students, and politicians, he told Howard, and was dined by the foreign minister in Tokyo. He worked on a new enlarged edition of Red Star , with added notes, CCP biographical data, and further extracts from his Mao interviews of 1936 and 1939. He prepared a revised and updated new edition of Red China Today .

His efforts to go back to China in the late 1960s were unsuccessful; in fact he too came under ultra-leftist xenophobic attack there as a "foreign agent," and those Chinese who had been associated with him were in

some cases pilloried for the connection. "Indications are that I won't sec you for a long time to come," he bitterly wrote Alley in July 1967. "One pays a price to remain independent in this world and it is so easy to make enemies without really trying." He wrote directly to Mao in mid-1969, complaining that "all my requests through diplomatic and other channels [to visit China] have met no response." (When Snow was finally back in China in 1970, Mao explained the delay to him, "It was a group of ultra-leftists in the Waichiaopu [foreign ministry] who were opposed to you.")^[52]

His wish to revisit China, he wrote Han Suyin in 1969, was "simply that I am eager to replenish my scant knowledge, on which this part of the world [the West] draws to a degree not justified but hard for me to ignore, for information and interpretation." And on the consistently troubling problems for him in safeguarding his "independent" credentials in the West without undercutting his "friendly" links to the Chinese, he explained to her: "It is not easy to retain credibility as an independent writer without occasionally being misunderstood—if one is to convey any of the truth—by those one would not choose as enemies." The truth was not that simple to convey "in forums where we function, and ambiguity, sometimes necessary, may confuse friends, and ineptirude turn one into a huai tan [bad egg]."^[53]

Snow had mounting misgivings on news of the harsh treatment of old friends in China. He commented to Anna Martens in April 1969 on a letter he received from Soong Qingling: She is "studying hard the works of the Chairman," and "mentions something about foreigners trusted for 20 yrs. who turned out to be renegades. Meaning the E's [Epstein and his wife]? Alors." Meanwhile, the Vietnam morass was causing him much anguish. On the eve of the 1968 presidential election, he wrote Mildred and Claude, condemning both Nixon and Humphrey, but with his harshest judgment directed at Johnson for "his whole immoral and stupid handling of U.S. power to waste lives and billions in senseless destruction."^[54]

Snow's chronic "plumbing" problems (as he called his kidney and urinary tract troubles) were a further complicating factor for him as the 1960s decade dosed and perhaps a warning of his terminal illness two years later. He was having "a general letdown, and unaccountably severe fatigue," he wrote Anna Martens in September 1969. Ordered to take a complete rest, he was forced to cancel some lectures in the States scheduled for that fall. It was the beginning of a difficult winter, with two operations and over a month in the hospital. Convalescence was impeded

by a return bout of malarial fever. "Ed's illness was so up and down," Lois told the Howard Snows in July 1970, "he's had such a long drawn-out recuperation—just when he seemed out of the woods, he'd be back in bed!" Though more like himself again, Ed told Mildred in May, "I still tire easily." He would never be really fully fit again. The nearly two-hundred-year-old Swiss farmhouse and barn the Snows purchased in 1968 was also a drain, eating up a great deal of energy and cash on necessary major modernization and refurbishing projects. They worked for months fixing up the house, Lois wrote Howard and Dorothy in January 1969. Ed, she perhaps overenthused, was a "whiz with all tools—not just that typewriter." "It is a beguiling whore," Ed wrote Charles (Chuck) Hogan in October 1969 about the Eysins house, "ever demanding more money and attention." But from their new home, Lois informed the Howard Snows, "we can dip into France in ten minutes, be on top of a mountain in a jiffy, or have lunch on a lake boat going to Montreux or Geneva.^[55]

In what seemed almost a replay of his thirteen-year sojourn in China, Snow looked on the Swiss location as temporary, with continued expressions to his sister and brother of his (and Lois's) intention to return to live in the United States—preferably, for Ed, to New England. "we would like to come home—we are still Americans," he told Mildred in May 1970. And in a heartfelt letter to Howard a year earlier (occasioned by the tragic death of Howard's daughter Karen), Ed reached out to his brother in terms also reminiscent of the early China years. There was a reflective sadness over the separate and separated lives of these now aging brothers. "I much need to discuss my own life with you; we have been too long too far apart," Ed wrote. "I am appalled at the short time remaining to us. How life speeds past." Yet Snow could still bounce back: "I can still do a day's work or a day's play—at tennis or swimming or skiing—with enjoyment if not with the old zest." As to thoughts of "retirement" (which he could ill afford, with two children to put through college), Ed told Howard, "I have still things to do; but I would like to be able to work fewer hours and to play more, and to enjoy—peace and quiet." The ensuing final two years would hardly fit that prescription.^[56]

As the 1960s ended, Snow was reassessing his ideas on the probable course of events in Asia. The turmoil in China proved to be a much more profoundly shattering and transforming phenomenon than he had envisaged, while his apocalyptic scenario for the United States and China had been a greatly overheated one. In a preface for the new edition of Red China Today , Snow looked at "China in the 1970's." He laid

out and seemingly endorsed the proclaimed policies and goals of Mao's new revolution—first and foremost establishing the "absolute authority" of Mao Thought. A younger generation of cadres had taken over, "albeit led by the Old Man." Mao was solidly in control, Snow insisted, and held a "new" Mandate of Heaven. The glorified Red leader had become "the personification of revolutionary creativity, independence, national self-esteem and world prestige."^[57]

Snow took notice of Mao Thought as "a kind of secular religion to which organized opposition was not possible." Still, the "paradox was that Mao Tse-tung's thinking was in spirit deeply populist." As Ed summed it up, "The revolutionary purpose was human emancipation, but Mao's way left no room for heterodoxy if the Vision was to be fulfilled: that the poor (and not any Mandarin elite) should inherit the Chinese earth, marching en masse toward an egalitarian and class-free future." The "paradox" Snow noted was also at the heart of his own thinking and would shortly be sharply revealed as he in turn experienced the impact of the "new secular religion."^[58]

On the prospects for Sino-American relations, Snow returned to the theme of reconciliation he had so ardently pursued in the early 1960s. China's (or Snow's?) fear of an American attack was now "reduced," with her major attention focused on what seemed the chief menace, the Soviets. A "renewal of Sino-American discourse now seemed plausible." It all brought back Snow's thesis of 1949. "As some saw it," he wrote in the 1970 preface, "China and Russia were obligingly containing each other, within the ruins of the communist monolithic." Washington could exploit the situation by favoring China as the weaker one, with moves (already being taken) toward relaxation of tension. Sooner or later, Snow noted, there would have to be a serious negotiation on the basis of the principles regarding Taiwan defined for Snow by Zhou Enlai in 1960. But, he added, perhaps letting his personal reactions color his judgments, "that time was not yet"—as evidenced by Nixon's recent "egregious political blunder" in "plunging" into Cambodia. This "amounted to repeating the tragic Vietnam miscalculation itself," he declared. Ironically, of course, the "new beginning" in America's China policy he had hoped for a decade earlier in the Kennedy years would come to pass under a president he disdained and whose motives he distrusted. It was another paradox he would soon face as a Mao-designated American symbol and emissary in this denouement.^[59]

Chapter 16
Last Hurrah

By 1970 the most violent and chaotic phase of the Cultural Revolution had ended, the unruly and destructive Red Guards had been disbanded, ultra-leftist extremists purged, and a stage of military-dominated consolidation was in progress. Under these circumstances, and with renewed Chinese interest in détente with America, Snow was once more on his way back. This time Lois was along for her rapturous first China experience. A call had come from the Chinese embassy in Paris in June; visas issued in early July, and the two Snows were off by Swissair from Geneva to Hong Kong at the end of that month. There had been hurried arrangements for the house, children, and financing. Chris, a commuter student at the University of Geneva, remained home in Eysins with house-sitting friends of the Snows; Sian would leave later for Boston to the Howard Snows, on her way to enter Antioch College in Ohio. Ed had worked out agreements with his European journalistic outlets, and the unfulfilled Macmillan book contract had been taken over by Random House.^[1]

Ed was still weak and recuperating from his surgeries; in Hong Kong he came down with a high fever and was hospitalized for a week with recurrence of a postoperative urinary infection. Illness and exhaustion would plague him throughout the six-month stay in the East. By mid-August he and Lois were in Canton, to begin a grueling round of travel and of Mao Thought-style briefings he soon found had a tedious and long-winded ritualistic sameness that lowered his spirits further. "China is a country with a single scenario," he noted shortly after arrival.^[2]

In Beijing, Snow found Rewi Alley aging and alone. Foreigners were isolated now, and Rewi no longer saw his adopted Chinese sons and their families. "He spoke quietly in a mix of nostalgia and loneliness and cautious hope," Ed recorded. The Chinese diplomat Huang Hua, Snow's old Yanjing student and interpreter, was just back from a May Seventh School for "re-educating" cadres, to shepherd the Snows around. He gave Ed a euphoric picture of the "new" new China. In discussions with Huang and others, Snow was told, "We disdain money and possessions. We desire to create socialist society and a new and nobler man." He also learned that his wartime Indusco colleague Chen Hansheng (now in his seventies) had "got caught up in the same evil wind that trapped Eppy [Epstein]."^[3]

Though quite fatigued, he was soon summoned one evening to see Premier Zhou during a North Korean-Chinese ping-pong match at a sports arena (only in China!). Snow had probably read reports by the Red Guards, the premier told him, "of things he [Zhou] had said and hadn't said." The Red Guards, Zhou continued, used what they wanted of his remarks, ignored the rest, or "invented things that had not been said." Zhou's statement was a telling commentary on the general level of revolutionary political discourse in China.^[4]

"The extent to which Mao dominates thinking and activity here," Snow noted after a few weeks, "is greater than I thought." The largest bookstore in Beijing now offered "nothing but Mao" and a few shelves of Marxist-Leninist works. ("Very few customers incidentally," he added.) Everybody in all spheres of activity was "catechismically" reciting and memorizing Red Book phrases. Snow wondered in his diary whether Maoist "self-reliance" could be "misinterpreted" as chauvinism. "What is internationalism except sharing of tasks with foreign comrades?" Lois, Ed recorded, "thinks she had found pure, sincere, selfless people—the ideal of the convent-bred—and of course she has, they exist. But one must ask at what sacrifice of truth, self-contradiction, etc." More disquieting was a documentary Snow was shown of Zhou Enlai's May visit to North Korea. Kim Il Sung "swaggers" and was surrounded by "black-suited hoods" and a "goosestepping" honor guard. "Perfect mechanical men. The whole thing in bad taste," Ed felt. Yet he could also ponder that China's Red Guards had been "a great adventure for millions.... It brought out leadership in young."^[5]

Snow endured four days of born-again confessional recitals at Qinghua University (a former "bastion of U.S. cultural imperialism," he was told). As he took notes on one of these evidently rehearsed group narrations, he

parenthetically added of a "fast-talking" young female student, "She knows her Mao. What am I doing here, wasting my time, and I have so little left." And as one interminable account followed another, "It's like a religious service, over and over again. How many times must it be repeated." Of an exposition by a member of the People's Liberation Army propaganda team at the university, Snow recorded, "This officer speaks as if he really believes it's only a matter of studying Mao to know the answers, as convinced as any Jesuit. He looks self-righteous but thinks he is kind, reasonable.^[6]

In the northwest, the Snows visited Yan'an, a May Seventh cadre school at Nanniwan, near Yan'an, and then went to Bao'an—Snow's first return there since 1936. At the cadre school, where Mao's directive on "going down to do manual labor" was being implemented, conditions seemed to Snow as hard as a prisoner's life. In Bao'an Snow saw his famous photo of Mao, taken in 1936, adorning the wall of Mao's old cave dwelling. They had arrived in Bao'an in a cavalcade of cars, not the way he came in 1936, Ed recorded. "We are receiving Vip treatment, a bit too much for my liking," he wrote editor Mary Heathcote. "What can I do?" Of his many briefings on the northwestern trip, Snow glumly noted, "Might as well stay in Peking and read Mao's works—memorize them." Back in Xi'an, Snow tried a lighter touch with his Chinese companions. "Mao Tsetung was a poet of note," he scribbled, "who lived by writing things to quote." They "did not think it was funny at all," he jotted. Snow pondered privately on all this: "All rival or complementary thought or doctrine being heresy as interpreted in the eyes of a rising new priestcraft which will soon be powerfully installed in the Party with army support." The "future bureaucrat—the product of the present ferment," will have "enormous power," he thought.^[7]

The Snows were back in Beijing for the October 1 National Day celebrations, and were invited to be on the Tiananmen balcony for the big parade. As they stood watching the spectacle, there was a tug on Snow's sleeve. It was the premier, who led the two to Mao, who gave Ed a smile of welcome and (as Lois afterward remarked to Ed) turned to look Lois over appraisingly, "Up and down," a few times. The famous photo of "friendly American personage" Snow standing beside the chairman at the rostrum balustrade was perhaps meant primarily as a signal to the Chinese people that the portrayal of America as the Great Imperialist Satan might be in for some official revision. (Henry Kissinger later wrote that the signal had been "so oblique that our crude Occidental minds completely missed the point.") Mao's next signal through Snow would be much more obviously and unmistakably directed to Washington.^[8]

There were many layers and complexities in Snow's attitudes and responses to the China he perceived in 1970. His extremely alienated view of Vietnam-era America played a critical part. When he had lived in opium-ridden old China, he told a veteran Red commander in Beijing, "I never thought that the U.S. would become saturated with dope [no longer a menace in China]—and that a big percentage of youths would be trying it." Snow went on: "I spoke of moral-political crisis: lack of respect for authority, breakdown in the law, lack of confidence in leaders—much of it traceable to Vietnam."^[9]

On a visit to Beijing University, now situated on the original Yanjing campus where he had lectured, it was "a bit shocking" to Ed "to hear Peita [Beijing University]—Yenching history summarized as 'cultural imperialist institution' and then go on to its [new] beginnings after Liberation." Snow was alerted to await an imminent meeting with Mao and spent time preparing and "waiting for Lefty." But his get-together with the chairman was put off for over two months until mid-December. (Ed would have preferred not to spend the winter in China. "I can't conceive myself working here without being forced to join the team.")^[10]

At another meeting with Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall, Snow was acutely aware of the toll on the premier of his unceasing, round-the-clock efforts to keep some sort of lid on cultural revolutionary anarchy. Zhou spoke of his aging, of heart problems, and said that he had not had a vacation in eleven years. His hand shook as he offered Snow sugar for his coffee. He had not had time for exercise and was up too many nights fill three a.m. or all night, he told Ed. But the indefatigable administrator took pains to work out Snow's itinerary for his remaining time in China. Zhou even made sure the two Snows would have warm overcoats made for their travel to the northeast (Manchuria), their "Zhou coats," Lois and Ed later called them.^[11]

In Beijing again in November, Alley confided to Ed on the political troubles his adopted son Allen had encountered through the years culminating in his imprisonment in the northwest on false charges after the Cultural Revolution began. He managed to escape and found haven with Alley and the Harems in Beijing, and was finally "liberated" through the intervention of Zhou Enlai. While in prison, "all around him comrades were dying of beatings, starvation, exposure and suicide," Snow was told. Alley's other son, Mike, had been digging ditches for two years. Snow pondered on the problems China would face restoring morale among those sent down to the countryside—whether actors and musicians, writers who had stopped writing, foreigners who were se-

questered, technicians (like Alley's son) digging ditches, doctors tilling the soil, or high-level bureaucrats tending pigs.^[12]

As Snow ruminated on all these aspects of the China scene, he tried to take the long view, but he hardly seemed to be convincing himself. "Injustice or violence vs history may be done and be unavoidable in the struggle for power in a given situation," he jotted in his diary, but the "record cannot be erased forever," and the "balance will be redressed in time." It "is not hard to die for the revolution but what is hard is to die for the revolution or be prepared to die for the revolution," he went on, "knowing that it may be tallied as a counter-revolutionary act by those temporarily in charge of the account books. Again the only solace is the impartiality of time." It was evidently a solace Snow himself sought to find in the situation.^[13]

Snow made the rounds of communes, factories, workshops, schools, hospitals, public works projects, and much else and was dearly impressed with what he observed. Alongside the numbing and all-pervasive and repetitive ideological cant he was subjected to, Snow seemed persuaded that Mao had steered the revolution back on its original peasant-populist track. In his posthumously published Long Revolution , Snow saw broad horizons ahead "as town and city meet to join farmer, worker, and intellectual in a one-class society," keeping "China fully occupied with peaceful works—carried out in a revolutionary way—till the year 2000." Though he was often skeptical of Lois's fresh and glowing response to China's seemingly squeaky-clean morality and proclaimed selfless devotion to the commonweal, Ed was nevertheless attracted by the possibilities (as were many others in the West at the time) of an ethical breakthrough to a new "socialist man." In writing to Mary Heathcote ostensibly on Lois's reactions but with obvious relevance to himself: "She loves the Chinese and they reciprocate. Their message gets through, she is impressed by their purity and dedication, and by the country they have scrubbed and are refurbishing—making green and great." ("For me," Lois wrote Dorothy and Howard Snow from Beijing, "it's all new, exciting, moving, interesting.") But contradictory realities were always intruding. Of a meeting with new revolutionary committee members in Shanghai, Snow recorded, "a sullen crowd," adding, "Few smiles. No gaiety, no joy. It's all revolution." Snow might applaud the Maoist remolding of people and society—but at arm's length.^[14]

As before, what ultimately carried the day for Snow were his one-on-one interviews and conversations with the Mao-Zhou twosome, who represented for Ed the abiding revolutionary verities of the Red star he

had known since 1936. And for the Red leaders, Snow remained the "friendly American" who offered the most suitable and reliable public channel for reaching out to America. In a November meeting with Zhou, the premier restated the principles he had first spelled out to Snow in 1960 for resolution of the Taiwan problem. Evidently responding to feelers already emanating from Washington, Zhou told Snow, "The door is open but it depends on whether the United States is serious in dealing with the Taiwan question." Mao would soon speak more bluntly to Snow on these matters.^[15]

As he continued to wait for "Lefty" in December, Snow came down with his usual sinusitis, plus bronchitis, and stayed in bed for a few days. ("I still tire too easily and need too much rest," he had earlier written Heathcote.) One mid-December morning while still asleep, he was peremptorily summoned to see Mao. They met in Mao's home, had breakfast together, and talked until past noon. The Chairman was down with a cold also and was sitting clothed in a dressing gown and with a blanket over him. The Cultural Revolution, Mao told Ed with equanimity, was "an all-round civil war," with factional fighting everywhere and in each organization, institution, and government ministry. From the Great Helmsman's loftily and abstractly ideological perspective, this was all to the good—"it wouldn't do if you didn't have this." Counter-revolutionaries and capitalist-roaders had to be struggled against and exposed. Conversely, Mao complained of the widespread violence and the maltreatment of "captives," neatly absolving himself of responsibility. Foreigners had been correct, he divulged, in saying that "China was in great chaos."^[16]

Snow, now more troubled than ever at the extremes of the Mao cult he had witnessed on this visit, pressed the chairman on the matter to a surprisingly frank degree. He brought up questions he had privately raised with Chinese official friends on his previous China trip regarding the "glorification" of the Red leader. It had seemed to him excessive and unnecessary. After all, he told Mao, "everybody knew that you were the main author of the revolution." Mao carefully responded with a combination of personal disclaimer (as well as justification—everyone wants to be "worshipped"), political necessity, and the "nuisance" of the still-prevalent Chinese tradition of "emperor worship." (This last, of course, the Mao deification had cynically exploited and magnified.) Mao reminded Snow of their 1965 talk, when he had linked Khrushchev's fall to the latter's lack of a personality cult. The subsequent massive propagation of the Mao cult, he now confided to his American friend, had been es-

sential in order to recapture the political high ground from the Liu Shaoqi-led "revisionists" who had gained control of the party apparatus.

Liu, a major Communist figure since the 1920s second only to Mao in party status and prestige, and president (until his downfall) of the People's Republic since 1959, was now dismissed by Mao as "a reactionary who had wormed his way into the Party." (Over a year before the time Mao related all this to Snow, Liu had died in solitary confinement of pneumonia, aggravated by ill treatment and neglect. His death and its circumstances would not be disclosed for years.) Now, Mao reassured Snow, the time had come to "cool down" Mao worship. "I don't like all this. We're going to put an end to it." He quickly added, however (in Snow's paraphrased notes), "we can't do it at once. Otherwise that would have the wrong impression too—meaning that Mao is sinking."^[17]

The Chinese leader shrugged off as "overdone" the "four greats" description of himself (Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander, and Great Helmsman). Only the simple "teacher" title will be retained; the rest would be got rid of "sooner or later." Mao's aspiring wise teacher role was far from a modest proposal in the Chinese cultural context. It seemed to have more in common with the place Confucius and his thought had held for two millennia as China's great sage and teacher. Adding to the ironies, while Mao was pointing to his schoolteacher background image as his preferred legacy, his Cultural Revolution had been reviling China's academic community in generic class-action terms as bourgeois "stinking intellectuals." On a rather similar note, in his Life article on the Mao conversation, Snow had cited Mao's apparent final comment to him: "he said he was not a complicated man but really very simple. He was, he said, only a lone monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella." But Snow's translator-companion in China, Yao Wei, wrote him that he had gotten this wrong. A "better translation," he told Ed, would be: "Like a monk holding an umbrella, I defy laws human and divine."^[18]

Snow's query to Mao on the prospects for improvement in Sino-Soviet relations elicited a Maoist tirade against Moscow. "Those Russians," he ended, "they look down upon the Chinese, they look down upon people of many countries; they think they have only to say a word and people will all listen to them. They do not expect there are people who won't, and one of them is my humble self." His battle with the Soviets, Mao underscored, was at the root of the current Chinese political straggle. "Basically," he told the journalist, "it is a question of revisionism or anti-revisionism. Those in China who practice revisionism are bound to compromise with the Soviet Union."^[19]

Turning to the United States, Mao made his open direct response to private signals coming from Washington on the possibilities of a Nixon visit. He preferred dealing with the Republicans rather than the Democrats, he averred, possibly thinking back to the (Democratic) Truman-initiated Taiwan intervention. If Nixon "wants to come to Peking, you may bring him a message," Mao told Snow. Nixon could come secretly if he wished. He "can just get on a plane and come." But Mao was also shrewdly aware of the potential political spin-off for Nixon of a China journey. The American president would likely come, he surmised, in the early part of 1972, before the next presidential elections. Nixon's journey to Beijing in February 1972 would indeed be far from a secret one. His arrival on Air Force One, covered by a vast media entourage, would be a television spectacle.^[20]

In his whimsically paradoxical Taoist manner, Mao declared Nixon to be "a good fellow"—the Red leader liked those "who were the most reactionary in the world." They "helped" the world revolutionary cause much as the Japanese had earlier done for China. "You just say [to Nixon]," Mao went on in this vein, "he is a good fellow! The No. 1 good fellow in the world. That Brezhnev is no good." More to the point, the chairman noted that problems with America could not then be resolved with "the middle or the left," but only with Nixon as "the representative of the monopoly capitalists." (In his meeting with Nixon, Mao told the president, "We do not like those presidents from Truman to Johnson [but] I cast a vote for your election.... I like rightists.")^[21]

Mao was undoubtedly also thinking of his own biological calendar in pressing an American opening. "I'm not all that well," he confided to Ed, repeating a probably exaggerated motif from his I965 talk with the American on the eve of his political comeback. "I'm 77 and I'm soon going to heaven." It would be Snow, not Mao, for whom time ran out before the Nixon journey. On an odd, lighter note, Mao chided Snow for the latter's failure to include the two young women interpreter-secretaries present, in a toast to the chairman. This Maoist defense of women's rights resonates incongruously with the recently published account of Mao's private life by his personal physician (now living in the U.S.), with its lurid details of the older Mao's "imperial" sexual penchant for young women.^[22]

When the two men parted for the last time, Mao dwelt for a moment on their mutually trustful thirty-five-year relationship. "I never lie to you and I believe you do not lie to me either." For China's supreme leader the "bourgeois" American journalist was perhaps closer to a genuinely

dependable friend, and confidant of sorts than he could find among his proletarian Chinese cohorts in the conflict-ridden and often paranoid sub rosa world of Communist politics. And while their special relationship had given Snow unique and invaluable advantages as a journalist, it had placed an inevitable psychological (and political) burden on him as well. The Mao-Snow phenomenon was the ultimate example of the Chinese concept of guanxi (special connections), in which friendship carried its obligations. Despite Snow's reservations on the Mao cult, he remained to the end deeply conscious of and inescapably swayed by Mao's exceptional consideration for and oft-expressed confidence in him.^[23]

On December 21 Lois left via Canton and Hong Kong, to be with her family in California for Christmas. She took with her material she had collected on China's new "revolutionary" opera and ballet for the book she would write, China On Stage . Ed had his holiday dinner at the Hatems, with Alley and other foreign friends also there. He prepared his Zhou interviews for publication, wrapped up other matters, and made the rounds of his Beijing friends. He continued to be very tired, was concerned at signs of renewed bladder infection and urinary problems. He was relying on "too much coffee, brandy, and cigarettes" to keep him going. He was anxious to finish and leave China, missed Lois; and felt "toute seule," he forlornly noted at the end of January. On top of this, at a dinner with his Chinese official hosts he raised provocative questions. "It was a bad evening. I did not have Lois to kick me under the table." There was also a disquieting conversation with Carmelita Hinton, daughter of William Hinton, who had been brought up and educated in China. She recounted the confusing experiences of students during the recent chaotic years. The youths were really working off their grievances against the system, she told him. "How can foreigners know anything about China," she quoted the Chinese students as saying, "when we don't understand it ourselves." As his China stay ended, Snow listed some of the minor and major irritations he had felt: the overfeeding, and the separation of foreign guests from the people; the retelling of the same shopworn stories to the visiting writers; the difficulties in getting information on major questions of the army, party, and economy; and the constant blare of political songs and slogans on planes and trains. Snow left by plane for Canton on February 6, 1971, and then by train to Hong Kong. He was exhausted, dispirited, and as troubled as he was inspired by his China experience, probably already in the early stages of the cancer that would end his life just a year later.^[24]

Snow's tardy departure from China changed original plans for him to join Lois in California. Instead, he returned directly to their Eysins home, while Lois proceeded to New York and there handled some of Ed's publications business. (The New York Times offered to publish only a "bowdlerized" version of his Zhou interviews, which Snow angrily rejected.) A phone call from Chris, telling his mother that Ed had arrived "terribly tired," quickly brought Lois home. Over the next weeks, Ed worked on articles, primarily for the Italian weekly Epoca that had largely financed his China trip, As he labored, events were moving toward the Sino-American rapprochement Snow had so ardently advocated since the establishment of the People's Republic. During the fall of 1970 Nixon had begun secret approaches to Beijing (obliquely referred to by Mao in the December meeting with Snow), through Pakistani and Romanian go-betweens. With encouraging responses from Zhou Enlai, these private exchanges went on through the early months of 1971. In Washington this process was orchestrated in the White House through Nixon's national security adviser (later secretary of state), Henry Kissinger, thus circumventing the state department bureaucracy.^[25]

In early April, in a characteristically subtle but dramatically unmistakable public signal exhibiting Zhou's diplomatic skills at its best, Beijing invited to China an American table tennis team then competing in world championships in Japan. In Beijing, the team was given a reception by the premier in the Great Hall, where Zhou stressed the friendship theme. The Americans duly invited the China team to the United States. This ping-pong diplomacy was further advanced with the publication in Life at the end of that month of Snow's write-up of his December conversation with Mao. The chairman had arranged for Snow to have formal notes of their talk that Ed could use for "guidance" and background, "from time to time, when needed." Evidently, the moment had now come. (Huang Hua had given an affirmative signal in response to Ed's urgent cabled query on publishing the Mao material.) "Mao would be happy to talk with [Nixon] either as tourist or President," Snow reported in the Life piece. He subsequently wrote the chairman that, "With the arrival of the table tennis players and other openings to Americans, the timing of the release seemed politically right." (On his own role in all this, Snow rather arrestingly wrote the Chinese consul, Xu [Hsu], in Geneva, "I hope all that I have written here and before is going to be helpful. I can only assume that there is a purpose to all interviews given to me which is not for me to judge or entirely comprehend.") Though Kissinger later downplayed the significance of the

Snow channel in the negotiations, he added, "Nevertheless, Snow's interview with Mao is interesting for what it tells us about the state of mind of China's leaders in December 1970. It shows that they were considering a Presidential visit at that early date, an idea not yet broached officially in any of our communications." In his annual report to Con-gross just before undertaking the China trip, Nixon gave a bit more weight to Snow's account, "which confirmed private signals we had already received of Chinese interest in my visiting China." It remained for Secretary of State William Rogers, out of the loop at the time, to react in the reflexes of the past. In a television appearance in London on April 29, he declared that the Nixon invitation, as reported by Snow in Life , was "fairly casually made," and he did not believe it was "a serious invitation."^[26]

On July 9 Kissinger embarked on an historic secret journey to Beijing via Pakistan, for direct talks with Zhou that would finalize the Nixon visit. He spent seventeen hours with the Chinese premier over a two-day stay, the first of many lengthy encounters between these two diplomatic protagonists. The personal assessment of Zhou Enlai by this highly sophisticated, hardheaded representative of "monopoly capitalist" America was well in line with that of "friendly American" Snow. "Urbane, infinitely patient, extraordinarily intelligent, subtle," Kissinger later recounted of the premier, "he moved through our discussions with an easy grace that penetrated to the essence of our new relationship as if there were no sensible alternative." That the two nations "would seek rapprochement in the early 1970s was inherent in the world environment. That it should occur so rapidly and develop so naturally owed no little to the luminous personality and extraordinary perception of the Chinese Premier." In making his dramatic televised announcement on July 15 of his forthcoming China trip, Nixon declared, "there can be no stable and enduring peace without the participation of the People's Republic of China and its 750 million people." All this, in essence, was the message Snow had tried to deliver to other American leaders a decade earlier.^[27]

In April, Lois and Ed drove to Sperlonga on the Italian Mediterranean coast above Naples for a desperately needed rest. On the way home they visited with Oliver Clubb and his family. Oliver, a political scientist, was the son of Ed's longtime friend O. Edmund Clubb, China hand and U.S. foreign service officer, and was then teaching in Syracuse University's program abroad in Florence. He remembered Snow's preoccupation with his health, and Ed's "somber" moments as wall as his

more typically warm, amiable, and "alive" qualities. Back in Switzerland, Ed found himself with a newly enhanced prominence in the rush of China developments. He was deluged, by phone and correspondence, with demands on his China expertise, on-the-spot experience, and unique connections—everyone, it seemed, wanted to visit China and expected (wrongly) that Ed could help them get there. (He was being bombarded by "an endless stream of people," he wrote Mao after returning home, "who think I am on the 'hot line' to the Peking visa department.") In response to Snow's pleas, his former Random House and Grove Press editor and warmly affectionate friend Mary Heathcote came over to Eysins in August to help Ed with his book. She arrived on crutches (an ankle fracture) and stayed on until December, when Snow's illness made further work on the incomplete volume impossible. Though Ed was dearly unwell, suffering from severe back pains he attributed to lumbago, the trio worked as best they could. Lois, herself incubating a severe case of hepatitis, concentrated on her book, and Mary and Ed on his. In October, Snow wrote John Simon of Random House that he had been "considerably set back in my work because of illness. I never knew what lumbago was before," he went on, "but in my case it has immobilized me." He was unable to sit at the typewriter for more than twenty minutes without resting for at least an hour, "and even that was against doctor's orders." In an effort to restore his vitality and spirits, Ed took off by himself for ten days in the sun and warmth of a beach on the Moroccan coast. He returned looking tanned, but it would be downhill for both Snows in the bleak and agonizing winter months ahead.^[28]

While Snow's niche as a pioneer China bridge-builder was now being widely recognized and acclaimed, it had a bitter taste for him, underlined of course, by his grave illness. In the era of Vietnam, he felt a sense of personal betrayal at an America gone wrong. And in a final rejection of his old belief that America could be a liberating force in the world, he wrote Owen Lattimore in May 1970 that his own earlier views on American exceptionalism had been "a mirage." "American imperialism," he told Lattimore, was especially dangerous precisely "because the people, thinking themselves free, could not imagine carrying anything but freedom elsewhere." And in March 1971, after his return from China, he wrote liberal Democratic Senator George McGovern ("in strict confidence ") on what he had learned in Beijing of Nixon's secret approaches to the Chinese on a presidential visit. "It is assumed there that, as China debate waxes hotter in the U.S., Nixon may attempt to get hold of the

China issue through some such stunt." To this future 1972 Nixon presidential opponent, Snow added, "I would like to see you get there first." In December, Snow confided to Hatem, "I never thought Nixon would invite himself to dinner with Mao." And in a press interview, evidently in Geneva, at the time he published his Life article on Mao's invitation to Nixon, Snow seemed to put the coming event in an oddly adversarial context. "Now some people say that because Mao offers to shake Nixon's hand he is ready to be 'taken in' by Wall Street and the Pentagon. They forget," he noted, "that Mao shook hands with Chiang Kai-shek to negotiate in 1945 and shook hands also to talk with American Ambassador Patrick Hurley. Where did that get them?" When Nixon sent Snow a brief letter two weeks before Ed's death, acknowledging the journalist's "distinguished career and achievements," Lois Snow later recounted, "We didn't answer the letter and we didn't hear again." A few weeks after Ed's passing, Lois wrote to their friend Charles Hogan, "The Nixon letter was sheerly political. I dismiss him with the contempt he deserves. "^[29]

As Snow reacted to the impending Nixon encounter with the Chinese, the foregoing not-unfounded political animosities and disillusionments inevitably affected his perception of the full significance and historic dimensions of these developments. In another Life article in July 1971 on the forthcoming presidential journey, Snow insisted that it was the Chinese who would be dealing from "a position of strength." With "a fierce domestic purge safely behind him," Mao saw "America's Vietnam venture a shambles" and believed "its political and economic position to be in trouble abroad and at home," Ed wrote. "Now, if there was a chance for China to recover Taiwan—Mao's last national goal of unification—and for China to be accepted as an equal in recognition of her great size, achievements, and potential, why not look at it?"—particularly in view of the Soviet threat from the north.^[30]

Snow concluded his assessment of future Sino-American prospects on a "two-cheers" admonitory note. "The millennium seems distant and the immediate prospect is for the toughest kind of adjustment and struggle." A "more realistic world is in sight," he continued, but "popular illusions that it will consist of a sweet mix of ideologies, or an end to China's faith in revolutionary means, could only serve to deepen the abyss again when disillusionment occurs." Reaffirming his own belief in the continuing imperatives for revolutionary. change in the world, with a Maoist China as its leading proponent, Snow added, "A world without change by revolutions—a world in which China's closest friends would

not be revolutionary states—is inconceivable to Peking. But a world of relative peace between states is as necessary to China as to America. To hope for more is to court disenchantment."^[31]

In fact the Sino-American détente ushered in both the post-Vietnam era of retreat from America's imperial interventionism in Asia, and the post-revolutionary era for China, at home and abroad. Zhou Enlai, the negotiator of the American opening, would also be the harbinger of the "four modernizations" policies that would soon mark the end of the Maoist epoch. (Zhou "is a builder, not a poet," Snow wrote in comparing him to Mao.) Perhaps Zhou was sending out some signals of his own on this, when in their July 1971 talks he rather strangely gave Kissinger an exposition on the Cultural Revolution. As Kissinger has described this singular episode: "With grace masking undoubted anguish, Chou described China as being torn between the fear of bureaucratization and the excesses of ideological zeal" which had put in jeopardy the fruits of fifty years of struggle. "He had doubted the necessity of such drastic measures, but Mao had been wiser; he had the vision to look far into the future. In retrospect," Kissinger remarked, "I doubt that Chou would have raised the point at all had he not wanted to disassociate himself from the Cultural Revolution at least to some extent and to indicate that it was over."^[32]

The dilemmas that may have faced Zhou as "Mao's indispensable alter ego," in Snow's words, could well have applied also to the American journalist as Mao's admiring Boswell. Snow had first come to the revolution in its initial Maoist emergence; he had been its most effective publicist, and he had witnessed Maoism's climactic final phase on his last visit. Perhaps the strikingly different temperaments and traits of the two extraordinary Red leaders with whom Snow's entire Red star experience had been linked, mirrored (and helped resolve) the nagging doubts and conflicts that his commitment to the revolution engendered. Ed summed it all up most revealingly in the letter he wrote Mao in July I969, at a time when his requests to return to China were being ignored and when he appeared to be under a cloud in the frenzied politics of the Cultural Revolution. In seeking the chairman's help for a China visit, Snow exhibited the aggrieved hurt of a true friend spurned while simultaneously highlighting and reaffirming his past contributions to Mao's cause and indeed his cult. "I hope that you will not forget that I have been for many years a firm supporter of your great leadership," he told the Great Helmsman. "I feel rarely fortunate to have, by chance, been privileged to know you and talk to you, and for that reason to have been able to help make known

to the world the life and work of a revolutionary fully the peer of Lenin. I hope that my work has not been useless." Now, as his own life ebbed away, so did the "Snow era" of Maoist communism.^[33]

In the broader perspective the Sino-American détente of 1972—looking beyond immediate political calculations, personalities, and cold war maneuverings—was clearly a triumph (if bittersweet) and vindication for Snow. He had persistently argued in the 1930s that an independent, united, and strong China was central to American strategic interests in the Pacific, at a time when Washington's neutrality policies were serving the needs of Japanese aggression against China. In bringing the Chinese Communists to the sympathetic attention of the West, in Red Star and much other writing, Snow consistently pictured the Reds as both patriots and revolutionaries. On the eve of full Communist victory in 1949, Snow had written (and later reiterated in Journey and Red China Today ) that "in the long run the Chinese Communist Party probably cannot and will not subordinate the national interests of China to the interests of the Kremlin." If American policy "is washed clean of interventionism, history may evolve along lines for which all the necessary preconditions now exist. China will become the first Communist-run major power independent of Moscow's dictation." In line with this, during the cold war years, he urged America to make its peace with the revolution now in power. He knew that the era of viable great power intervention in China, Russian or American, was over. He insisted that it continued to be in America's (and China's) best interests for these two great nations on opposite shores of the Pacific to come to terms. ("We became friends because we had mutual interests," Nixon would later declare.) In pressing for Sino-American understanding, Snow had tended to underplay, though not ignore, ideological and political barriers. "No differences in historical experience, present social or political institutions, or conflicting national interests," he had written Mao in 1963, "could possibly justify a great war or continued great hate on both sides." But Snow believed always—if often in contradiction to his Maoist sympathies—that true human liberation ultimately demanded of all societies full economic and political empowerment of their peoples. Probably the ideals and principles of the wartime Chinese industrial cooperative movement, with its mix of individual and collective rights, interests, and responsibilities, best exemplified his notion of the good society.^[34]

In late November 1971 Snow underwent diagnostic tests that revealed pancreatic cancer that had already involved the liver. Lois was herself then in the hospital with infectious hepatitis. Still weak and not entirely recovered, she returned home as Ed prepared to enter a Lausanne hospital in

mid-December for major surgery. The grueling operative and postopera-five ordeal did nothing to arrest the mortal course of the disease. Ed was evidently made aware of his condition but tried to deny its full implications. ("Ed knows he has cancer," Lois told the Howard Snows at the end of December, "how serious it is I don't think he knows now." He wanted no one to know it was cancer, she added.) He talked of recuperation, and of his work and plans. An assignment to go to China in advance of the Nixon media influx as a correspondent for Life and Epoca had to be postponed (then canceled). In these last months, he was thus finally once again sought after and welcomed back to center stage by a mainstream (and conservative) mass-circulation American periodical, in much the fashion of his peak years with the Post . "You have fans, including me," Life's managing editor, Ralph Graves, wrote Snow in July 1971. "I would feel deeply disappointed," Graves told Ed in September, "if your report on the Nixon visit to China did not appear in LIFE."^[35]

Ed returned home at the end of December still alluding to recovery and to further work on his book. In early January he could write John Simon of Random House that he had been operated on for "pancreatitis with complications," and that the surgeon "assures me that with proper continued rest and rebuilt resistance I should be back to relatively normal health again in a month or so." And later that month he wrote Premier Zhou, "It is of course greatly disappointing not be in China now but perhaps I can be more useful later." But Snow grew steadily weaker while enduring ineffective chemotherapy treatments.^[36]

In these circumstances, the two Chinese leaders with whom his life had been so intertwined gave a valedictory expression of friendship and esteem that now rose above any further considerations of political benefit. (Snow in turn sent final poignant "Dear Friend" messages, dictated to Lois, to the chairman and the premier.) Immediately after hearing the bleak prognosis that followed Ed's surgery, Lois sent a detailed account to George Harem in Beijing, and a transcript of the medical report. In her anguished state, and with her faith in China's health care system and "miracles," she implored, "can anything be done? I have said that if anything really serious came up I'd go to China (Oh God, we were there when this horrible thing was growing in Ed!). That is why I turn to you. What do you think?" On the basis of Lois's information and appeal, a team of medical specialists and nurses was dispatched from Peking in late January to minister to the stricken journalist.^[37]

These last weeks have been movingly recorded by Lois Snow in her book on Ed's terminal illness. ("I read [the book] with tears," Soong Qingling later wrote Lois, "as the face of our dear Ed appeared on every

page.") Since Snow was already too ill and weak for the original plan to transport him to Beijing for care and treatment, the Chinese team instead transformed the Snow house into an improvised hospital, greatly easing family burdens and giving Snow as comfortable and dignified an end as was medically and humanly possible. They "released Ed from care and pain," Lois wrote Charles Hogan after Snow's death. Dr. Ma (Harem), who had trekked into Red China with Ed thirty-six years before, came as a member of the Chinese medical party. Snow slipped in and out of consciousness, rousing himself for a last time during a visit by Huang Hua, now the first ambassador of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations. As Huang and Hatem stood by his bedside, Snow quipped at this reunion of the three "bandits." Ed soon fell into a final coma and, with the Chinese medical group in attendance, died peacefully in the early morning of February 15, the first day of the Chinese lunar New Year. Less than three days later Nixon left Washington for his rendezvous with the Red leaders in Beijing. While Snow would not be among the throng covering the event, Nixon was advised by diplomatic cable from Geneva to "sample" Snow's writings, since "his name [is] likely [to] arise [in] conversation" with the Chinese leaders.^[38]

Condolences came from Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Soong Qing-ling, and tributes and warm recollections from dignitaries and friends around the world. There were memorial services in Geneva, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, and at the United Nations Chapel in New York. In Sneden's Landing, where the Snows had lived for a time after their marriage, old friends gathered to remember and reminisce. Snow some time before had left a brief will and instructions for disposing of the "evidence" after his death. These oft-cited directions distilled much of the essence of his people-centered outlook, and his dual bonds to America and China:

Please cremate the "evidence," mentioned above. Then if you don't mind, someone please scatter some of the ashes over the city of Peking, and say that I loved China, I should like part of me to stay there after death as it always did during life. America fostered and nourished me. I should like part of me to be placed by the Hudson River, before it enters the Atlantic to touch Europe and all the shores of mankind of which I felt a part, as I have known good men in almost every land.

In general accord with these wishes, Snow's ashes were interred in part in the garden of a friend's home overlooking the Hudson in Sneden's Landing, and part on a rise beside No-Name Lake on the lovely campus

of Beijing University. It was here, formerly the site of Yanjing, that Ed had taught for a time, and where he liked to stroll along the shores of the serene lake. ^[39]

Snow always reported with both heart and mind, the former state department China hand John Service wrote in remembrance. Ed recognized that "everyone of the billions of the plain people on this earth is valuable, and deserving of respect," Mary Heathcote said of him. Jim Bertram may have encapsulated his old friend's complex and contradictory makeup best: "a true liberal-democrat-radical, a rational romantic, a practical idealist," he wrote Lois and the children. Snow had given his own, more personal estimate of his life's endeavors in a 1969 letter to Howard: "All the things I thought of doing—learning, writing—increasingly seem beyond attainment and I know that I have done probably the most that I can do in this brief span."^[40]

Since Ed's death, Lois Snow has continued to live in her Eysins home, with frequent visits to family and friends in the States, and some return trips to China—but none since Tiananmen. In the first years, she did lectures and articles on China and wrote her account of Ed's final travail; in 1981 she published Edgar Snow's China , compiled from Snow's writings on China from 1928 through 1949. Chris and Sian also live in Switzerland. They both now work as translators in Geneva.

How might Snow react to post-Mao China, shorn of its egalitarian-liberationist glow, and with a severely tarnished image of the chairman to whose revolutionary vision the American was so drawn to the end? Very likely the prospect would bring even more forcefully to the surface his skeptical turn of mind, and the troubling thoughts he so often recorded on the pitfalls of authoritarian political systems, fundamentalist thinking, and infallible superleaders. (It is a consummate irony that Snow was so closely linked with a revolutionary icon whose rule came so thoroughly and lethally to epitomize these patterns.) The pain and outrage of Lois Snow, and of Christopher and Sian, to the Tiananmen events of June 1989, may tell us something here. Still, Snow would also welcome China's greater opening to the outside world and its dynamic economic progress—though with a quizzical eye at its "capitalist road" directions and seamy social spin-offs. (Viewing the energetic accomplishments of the Hong Kong Chinese during a visit there in 1968, Snow speculated that if China itself could find a "medium" between such a "selfish" money-making drive and the Maoist preoccupation with "reforming man," then "nobody else could prevail against such a [productive] force.") He would be underscoring the importance of carefully

managing the complex, mutually advantageous, but often edgy Sino-American relationship, with its risks always of stirring up cold war-like anti-Communist tendencies on the American side, and still prevalent imperialist perceptions of America on the part of the Chinese—the latter amply documented in David Shambaugh's recent study of China's professional "America Watchers." As the authors of Sentimental Imperialists observe, of the China "regained" after 1972, "the danger remained—as always in this relationship—that excessive [American] hopes and illusions would be followed by dangerous despair, disillusionment, and hostility." Snow would probably largely subscribe to the views expressed by former New York Times Beijing Bureau Chief Nicholas D. Kristof in a 1993 article: "We should be skeptical of Chinese intentions [as, he had also noted, the Chinese are of ours], without falling into hos-tility. We should maintain a dialogue with China, even if the tone is not always cordial." China, Kristof added, "is not a villain. It is not a renegade country like Iraq or Libya, but rather an ambitious nation that is becoming the behemoth of the neighborhood .... If China is able to sustain its economic miracle, then [the] readjustment of the scales will be one of the most important—and perhaps dangerous—tasks in international relations in the coming decades." For an earlier time, and in a vastly more adversarial Sino-American context, Snow had been alerting his compatriots to such realities.^[41]

But beyond China, Snow was above all a master journalist who grip-pingly and compassionately chronicled a violent and intractable world where the have-nots immensely outnumbered the have-gots. He consistently acted on the belief that he could make a difference in changing things for the better, as he saw it. It was the essence of his commitment as a journalist and of the truths he sought to convey. "My view is that writing justifies itself," he wrote a Chinese journalist in 1964, "if its results add even a very small net contribution to man's knowledge, and I believe that that cannot be done without advancing the interests of the poor and the oppressed of this world, who are the vast majority of men."^[42]

However this was never that simple, nor could it be. The revolutionary causes and liberating forces he looked to often fell disappointingly short or spawned new evils of their own. The decades of superpower contention and interventionism, of cold and hot war and nuclear-based arms races, shattered Snow's vision of a new world order—one in which an enlightened and nonimperial America could cooperate with a more benign Soviet heading an Eastern bloc of "fraternal" states, in a peaceful

international environment that could accommodate necessary radical change in the have-not regions of the world. When told in China in 1970 that Mao planned to interview him rather than the other way round, Snow reflected that he was merely a "democratic personage," not "a man of power." In essence, Snow could propose, but others disposed.^[43]

There was always in Snow a mix of hope and despair, of faith and disillusion—perhaps a mirror of the twentieth-century world he knew— one of unprecedented progress and unspeakable horrors, phenomenal advances and disheartening setbacks. In Journey Snow wrote that humankind had come to "a parting time from our pre-history, a true childhood's end when men at last have to begin behaving like Man." The world would have to mature from its "anarchy of nationalism" to "a higher concept of federated world authority," he pursued this theme in Red China Today . But in his darker moments he saw "childhood's end" as a distant prospect at best. It was "a childish sentiment" on his part, he confided to Jim Bertram in 1959, not "to see man universally as the ignorant, selfish, fearful and extremely primitive and pathetic creature he is—collectively capable of acting most dynamically only under compulsions of fear, and aggressively, despite individual potentials for behavior of nobility and love and reason."^[44]

On a similar note, in an undated fragment Snow wrote (and preserved), probably while working on Journey , he reflected on a world that failed to come up to his earlier expectations:

I see that much of my disillusionment after the war was because I still had illusions that [the] war was going to start a new world, that we could relax and enjoy the fruits of hard labor, of hard work, of honest predictions fulfilled. I myself did relax. I resented the intrusion of new dilemmas, new problems. I had forgotten that a billion people still had unsatisfied wants, that oppression of myriad kinds continued. I was satisfied but the rest of the world was not. I wanted peace but other men did not. I believed it was possible to adopt a new behavior in human relationships, international affairs, but other men did not. History had so conditioned them that they could not. Who would and could ever condition them to react in my way? ... Men do NOT have imagination; cannot be influenced by things they do not experience. See how we have forgotten Maidanek, we do not remember it and learned nothing from it.^[45]

Our contemporary age, though marked by impressive strides in human advancement, is still scarred by intensified nationalisms and ethnic, tribal, and religious extremism and conflict in many parts of the globe (magnified further with the collapse of Eastern European and So-

viet communism). There are human rights shortfalls, and a continuing gulf between the have-gots and the have-nots of the world. It speaks both to Snow's somber thoughts on collective humanity and on the urgency of his call for "childhood's end." The "richest billion people command 60 times the income of the poorest billion," according to the United Nations 1994 report on human development. "The world can never be at peace unless people have security in their daily lives," it warns. "The new demands of global human security," it adds, "require a more positive relationship among all nations of the world—leading to a new era of development cooperation." And as Bruce Urquhart recently remarked in regard to the problems of global policing and peacekeeping, "Sooner or later, the interdependent nature of the world we have created will pose the choice between a decline into chaos and a global society based on law." Snow's vistas of a demilitarized world of liberated nations and uplifted peoples, united in a collectively secure, equitable, and peaceful international order, remains an ongoing quest of our planet.^[46]