thumb|Hurley (second from right) being sworn in as Assistant War Secretary by John B. Randolph. Outgoing Assistant Secretary [[Charles B. Robbins and Secretary of War James W. Good look on.]]

Patrick Jay Hurley (January 8, 1883July 30, 1963) was an American attorney, Republican Party politician, military officer, and diplomat. He was the 51st United States Secretary of War from 1929 to 1933 in the cabinet of Herbert Hoover and a key American diplomat during World War II. As ambassador to China in 1944 and 1945, Hurley is remembered for his instrumental role in the recall of General Joseph Stilwell in favor of Albert Coady Wedemeyer, his advocacy for a rollback strategy in China, and his public criticism of State Department policy at the onset of the Second Red Scare. He was the first Oklahoman to serve in a presidential cabinet.

Hurley came from humble origins, born to Irish immigrant parents in Indian Territory (today Oklahoma). He worked as a mule driver and with Will Rogers as a cowboy. He attended Indian College in Muskogee and the National University School of Law in Washington, DC before opening a legal practice in Tulsa in 1908. Specializing in oil and gas law and investing heavily in real estate, Hurley achieved rapid success. He was elected president of the Tulsa Bar Association in 1911. He was also helped by his connections in the Republican Party. After Hurley unsuccessfully ran for the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 1910, President William Howard Taft appointed him as the national attorney for the Choctaw Nation.

Hurley was wounded in World War I and received the Silver Star. His parents immigrated to the United States from Ireland and settled in Indian Territory. He started working as a mule driver for coal mines at age 11 alongside his father and at age 15 attempted to enlisted in the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, but was turned away for being too young. He worked while attending Indian College (now Bacone College) where he graduated in 1905. He received his law degree from the National University School of Law, Washington, in 1908.

Pancho Villa Expedition and World War I

Hurley enlisted in the Indian Territorial Volunteer Militia in 1903 and he later served in the Oklahoma National Guard. In 1916, he was called to active duty and participated in the Pancho Villa Expedition. After the expedition, he was assigned to the Judge Advocate General's Corps and assigned to Washington D.C.

Hoover administration

Hurley chaired Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign in Oklahoma in 1928. He was successful in delivering additional food and ammunition to the soldiers on three separate occasions but could not evacuate them.

The first and potentially only high-ranking US military officer to be granted access to Soviet combat operations on the Eastern Front, Hurley reported amiable relations with Soviet military officers. He gave his Soviet aides nicknames from Native Americans chiefs, "Rain-in-the-Face" and "Sitting Bull." He also reported that the Soviet generals "were interested in the amount of war supplies–especially planes, tanks, and trucks–that the United States [could] furnish Russia" and that they were adamant that a second front needed to be opened soon. An Iranian-American historian, Abbas Milani, described Hurley as "an odd and eccentric character" who was "horrified" by the "abject poverty amongst the people and arrogant disdain for the populations by the British and Soviet ambassadors." Hurley argued that Iran's two main problems were the illiteracy of most Iranians and Iran's semi-colonial status to the Soviet Union and Britain. The success of Operation Ichigo brought to a head the long simmering conflict between General "Vinegar Joe" Joseph Stilwell and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It was that crisis that brought Roosevelt to send Hurley to China.

Hurley arrived in China in August 1944, as a personal envoy from Roosevelt to Chiang. His written directive from the President was as follows:

On his way to Chongqing, the capital of the Republic of China at the time, Hurley had stopped in Moscow to meet Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, who claimed to him that Mao and the rest of the Chinese Communists were "margarine Communists" and that the Soviet Union was not associated with them. The claims were accepted by Hurley at face value. Besides getting Chiang to cede more command powers to Stilwell, Hurley was also ordered to ensure that Chinese Communists accepted Stilwell as their commander and to see if it were possible for American Lend-Lease aid to go to Mao Zedong in Yan'an. Eventually, Stilwell's belief in Chiang's incompetence and corruption reached such proportions that Stilwell sought to cut off Lend-Lease aid to China in October 1944.

Hurley maintained that his talks with Foreign Minister of R.O.C T. V. Soong were going well. Hurley warned Stilwell at a meeting at the US embassy in Chongqing that the harsh language of the Stilwell's plan to create a Chinese United Front under his command would offend Chiang. In a speech before the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang that was leaked to the Chinese press, Chiang denounced Stilwell and said that to accept the American ultimatum would be to accept a new imperialism that would make him no different from the Japanese collaborator Wang Jingwei in Nanking. Before sending his cable, Hurley showed it to Stilwell, who accused Hurley to his face of "cutting my throat with a dull knife."

On 7 November 1944, Hurley visited Yan'an to meet Mao with the aim of creating a united front to unite the Communists and the Kuomintang to fight the Japanese, which Hurley viewed as a chance for personal glory for himself. Chiang wanted Hurley to meet Mao, partly to please Roosevelt and partly because he expected Hurley to fall out with the Communists. When Hurley arrived via plane at Yan'an, he was greeted by Zhou Enlai and Colonel David D. Barrett of the American Dixie Mission to the Communists. Mao called for a coalition government, a joint military council with an equal number of Communist and Kuomintang generals, US military aid to the Chinese Red Army, and the freeing of all political prisoners, most notably Marshal Zhang Xueliang, the "Young Marshal" and former warlord of Manchuria who had kidnapped Chiang in 1936, during the Xi'an incident. Mao and Hurley both signed the declaration with Hurley proudly writing next to his name "Personal Representative of the President of the United States".

In early November 1944, upon the resignation of Ambassador Clarence E. Gauss, Hurley was officially offered the ambassadorship to China but initially declined "with a statement that the duties he had been called upon to perform in China had been the most disagreeable that he had ever performed--and further, he felt that his support of Chiang Kai-shek and the National Government of China had increased the opposition directed toward himself by the un-American elements in the State Department." Upon receiving a telegram from Roosevelt on November 17, urging him to take the job because of the critical nature of the situation, he reluctantly accepted. Hurley's appointment was greeted with dismay by the professional diplomats at the embassy in Chongqing, who complained that Hurley knew nothing of China and was out of his depth.

An American war-time intelligence officer, Graham Peck, later wrote, "His handsome aquiline head suggested a Roman burst capriciously passed up with butterflies of a huge bow tie, pinch-nose glasses, curly white mustache and coiffure." Hurley liked to be addressed as "General," always wore all of his medals at public events, and used "we" instead of "I" to address people as if everyone was in agreement with what he was saying, a speaking habit that many found very annoying. Hurley's first acts as ambassador were to buy a new Cadillac and to have the embassy redecorated in a grandiose style that he saw fit for an ambassador of the United States. One American diplomat, Arthur Young, called Hurley "a senile old man who couldn't keep his mind on any subject." An American journalist who went to lunch with Hurley recalled that they spent three hours drinking hard booze before they started to eat while Peck was invited to dinner with the ambassador, who forgot what his name was and had to ask Peck who he was several times. At a dinner with senior diplomats and Chinese leaders, Hurley toasted the journalist Annalee Jacoby, who was present as "the most important person in the world, my tall, blonde goddess of a bride." He went on to give a rambling, sexually explicit speech about their children, all of the joy she had given him, and all the pleasures of having sex with her. Everyone else maintained a stunned silence; Jacoby was a short brunette, was not Mrs. Hurley, and had no children with Hurley—she maintained most vehemently that she had never been the lover of the ambassador. As Hurley saw Chiang more than Mao, it was the former who had the most influence on him. On 2 December 1944, Hurley, in a cable to Washington, argued that China's recent problems were the work of the British who were the "greatest obsolete [sic] to the unification of China."

In January 1945, Hurley met US Rear Admiral Milton E. Miles and the Chinese secret police chief Dai Li, who first informed him of a secret visit to Yan'an by Colonel William Bird of the OSS, of which the ambassador had been unaware. As Wedemeyer was living at the embassy with Hurley, this made for unpleasant living arrangements; Jacoby later recalled that the two had "loud, noisy quarrels" lasting well into the night and Wedemeyer sent several cables to Washington questioning Hurley's mental fitness to be ambassador. When the American military attaché suggested in a cable in March 1945 that the Chinese might be willing to accept Hong Kong being liberated from the Japanese by the British, Hurley wrote to Washington that it was "British imperialist propaganda-and while supporters of this propaganda may be entitled to their own views in their premises, I know of no reason why American officers serving in China should undertake to sponsor such propaganda or to disseminate it within the American government." Hurley's relations with General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart who was Churchill's special envoy to China were not good, as Hurley saw Carton de Wiart as a sinister figure upholding the British Empire, which Hurley wanted to see dismantled. Roosevelt had also sent Hurley to China to keep "an eye on European imperialism," a directive that Hurley took very seriously, believing America had a special mission to end all European power and influence in Asia.

Hurley held out hope that after Roosevelt's death, President Harry S. Truman would recognize what he regarded as the errors of Yalta and rectify the situation, but his efforts in that direction were in vain. After Japan had signed an armistice with the Allies on 2 September 1945, Chiang had suggested a meeting with Mao in Chongqing. The civil war was expected to resume in China, and Chiang wanted to be seen by the Chinese people as having done everything to avoid the civil war before it started again. Mao said he would not fly to Chongqing unless Hurley was on the plane as he believed that otherwise, Chiang would shoot it down. Chiang wrote in his diary: "How comical this is! Never imagined that the Communists could be so chicken-hearted and shameless. Only three days ago communist newspapers and radio denounced Hurley as a reactionary imperialist. This selfsame imperialist has become Mao's guarantor of safety".

In September 1945, the plane carrying both Hurley and the Communist delegation landed in Chongqing. Hurley was the first man to emerge, who in the words of the British journalist Jonathan Fenby had "a broad smile on his face as he waved his fedora hat in triumph," followed by Mao.

On November 26, 1945, Hurley submitted a scathing letter of resignation, two hours after his meeting with Truman. Hurley wrote in his letter of resignation, "I requested the relief of the career men who were opposing the American policy in the Chinese Theater of war. These professional diplomats were returned to Washington and placed in the Chinese and Far Eastern Divisions of the State Department as my supervisors. Some of these same career men whom I relieved have been assigned as supervisors to the Supreme Commander in Asia. In such positions most of them have continued to side with the Communist armed party and at times with the imperialist bloc against American policy." In addition to criticizing liberal diplomats, Hurley lashed out against the "imperialist" powers of France, Britain and the Netherlands, whom he accused of seeking to maintain their empires in Asia at the expense of American interests.

Later life

Though Hurley had attempted in 1944 to create a "united front" in China and at times had been very sympathetic towards Mao himself, this was forgotten as Hurley reinvented himself as a hard-right Republican who promptly become to American conservatives a "martyr," an honest diplomat who had been undercut by the supposed "fellow travellers" and Soviet spies in the infiltrated State Department's Soviet spies, who had controlled America's China policy. Hurley stated that his efforts to aid Chiang had been undercut by Roosevelt, whom Hurley portrayed as the puppet of Soviet spy Alger Hiss.

Hurley was the Republican candidate for a seat in the United States Senate for the state of New Mexico in 1946, 1948 and 1952, but he lost all three attempts against the Democratic nominees. Hurley started the United Western Minerals Corporation of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was involved in the rush to start uranium mining in the Ambrosia Lake region of New Mexico in the 1950s.

Legacy

Both contemporary and modern assessments of Hurley are critical of his record.

Albert Coady Wedemeyer, commander of American forces in China after General Stilwell, once noted that Hurley's failing health in 1944-1945 could be affecting his abilities as American ambassador to China.

|}

References

Sources

  • Russel D. Buhite, Patrick J. Hurley and American Foreign Policy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973.
  • Don Lohbeck, Patrick J. Hurley, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956.
  • Merle Miller, "Plain Speaking: an oral biography of Harry S. Truman", New York, NY; Berkley Publishing Company, 1974. pp. 251–252.

|-

|-

|-

|-