Abstract

Chiang's Washington Front

When U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson ridiculed the idea that the U.S. was losing face in Asia in 1949 as the result of State Department policy toward China, he was taking a slap at Chinese Nationalist lobby in the U.S. One of the lobby's sparkplugs is a New York importer named Alfred Kohlberg. Operating through the American China Policy Association, Kohlberg is a fount of propaganda for the Nationalist cause, sending masses of material to a list of 2,000 editors. Though Kohlberg is not registered as a Congressional lobbyist, Capitol Hill is flooded with his pro-Nationalist material. In at least one instance the Chinese embassy itself has lobbied against a Presidential appointment. In July 1949 a high embassy official met secretly with a group of ten U.S. Senators to urge the defeat of W. Walton Butterworth as Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East.