Robert Newman not only leads up to his highly praised history of the Owen Lattimore story and the influence of the "China Lobby" with this account, but gives much denied credit as well to the history of the left which had been censored, denied, and castigated... Included is a little-known quote from Lillian Hellman in her opening remarks to the Waldorf Peace Conference in 1949, which she co-organized. The Waldorf Conference was a credit to the post-WWII anticolonialist peace movement fueled by the activism of the radicalism of the 30s. This social/political/cultural movement included among others Hellman and W.E.B. DuBois, who founded the Peace Information Center in 1950 and circulated the Stockholm Peace Petition at a time when the Soviet Union was allegedly running a "peace offensive" and at a time when anyone who promoted peace or who criticized U.S. policy must therefore be viewed as being an agent of a foreign govt. in the McCarthy hysteria. Not only was anyone associated with those promoting peace at risk of suspicion, but also anyone who showed any independent thinking regarding foreign policy, no matter how extensive the institutional experience (as in Melby's case) or how well-founded the logic. This was the case with John Melby, chief editor of the China White Paper which acknowledged the inevitable failure of the KMT and the subsequent "loss of China." Just as anyone associated with the Waldorf Conference was eventually brought before HUAC and/or blacklisted, so anyone associated with authorship of the China White Paper was subjected to loyalty security board hearings and their careers ruined, but for different cause. The irony of this book is that it illustrates how the relationship of Melby and Hellman resulted in a collision of these two very different worlds of thought, intellectual culture, career, and experience.

Melby was a worker in the American Embassy in China during the three year Chinese Civil War. He gives his perspective along with interesting stories about who lost China. Who lost China?
Well, the Generalissimo and the Kuomintang lost China. Marshall and the U.S. Ambassador Dr. Stuart tried to get the Nationalists and Communists to form a coalition government, but instead both sides were hell bent on trying to beat the other by military means. One senses a disgust by Melby for the corrupt Nationalist
government and a certain trust in the Communists. However history will prove him wrong because of the subsequent millions of deaths caused by Mao and his henchmen. The Kuomintang were certainly corrupt and stupid, but history will record them as less brutal than the Communists.
This is a hard book to read. The reader has to have a certain knowledge of Chinese events and persons in order to understand this narrative. However one will understand why no Americans lost China, it was the Nationalists who defeated themselves. Chiang Kai Shek does not come off as a trustworthy person, and he ultimately deserves the responsibility for losing his country to the Communists.