China Lost By U.S. Demons

John T. Flynn's latest book is an appropriate conclusion to the blindly partisan Congressional Investigations of our Asian policy. He whips up the theory that we "sold out" Asia China to the Reds, adds a pinch of pipe-dream, and seasons the dish with his own violent prejudices. The resulting book offers two hundred pages of emotional mincemeat.

Ironically enough, Mr. Flynn uses the Marxian devil theory of history to make his point. Because the Communists won out in China he assumes that someone in Washington must be guilty of conspiracy and treason. Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes Devil Number One and is pictured as both a raging-power-crazy-world-dictator and a senile piece of flotsam at the same time. Devil Number Two includes the N.Y. Times, Herald Tribune, Harpers, Atlantic Monthly, and Saturday Evening Post and assorted "Internationalists." Mr. Flynn really believes that these Devils drugged the American Mind into unconsciousness while they wrapped up Asia and gave it to Stalin with best wishes. As evidence he points to twenty-three books that disagree with him on China (including those of John K. Fairbank and Foster Dulles); these books are labeled as "pro-Communist" and dismissed.

It is interesting that Mr. Flynn never once mentions the Chinese people in his book. He assumes that we could control this nation of 450 million merely by sending in war material and pushing the right buttons in Washington. Unfortunately this is one of the mistaken notions that actually did cost us China. But the most discouraging aspect of a book like "While We Slept" is not its slipshod thinking but its totally negative approach. The author's vitriolic attack on a dead president and a group of largely imaginary Devils is of no use in formulating foreign policy today. Mr. Flynn's new book could be accurately titled "The Road to No-where."