Patrick J. Hurley

Patrick Jay Hurley

Hurley in 1929

Patrick Jay Hurley (born January 8, 1883 in Indian Territory , † July 30, 1963 in Santa Fe , New Mexico ) was an American officer, politician and diplomat who belonged to the Republican Party .

Act

The in the field of Choctaw Nation born Hurley began in 1908 in Oklahoma to practice as a lawyer and was Colonel in the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War . After the war he became active in the Republican Party and served as the 51st US Secretary of War under President Herbert Hoover between 1929 and 1933  . Before that, in 1929 he had already been Deputy Secretary of War for a few months .

Second World War

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Hurley received a promotion to brigadier general . General George C. Marshall sent him to East Asia as a personal envoy to check whether the American troops besieged on the island of Bataan could be evacuated. On three separate occasions he succeeded in supplying the soldiers with supplies of food and ammunition; however, evacuation proved impossible.

After completing this mission, he took on a variety of roles as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's personal confidant . He became envoy to New Zealand in 1942 and then flew to the Soviet Union . He became the first foreigner to be allowed to visit the Eastern Front. Over the next two years, he visited the Middle East , the Middle East, China and Afghanistan on behalf of the President before becoming the United States Ambassador to the Republic of China in 1944 .

China

In August 1944, Hurley arrived as President Roosevelt's personal envoy to Chiang Kai-shek , China. The President's written instructions were as follows:

You are hereby appointed as my personal representative to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek who teaches me personally. Its primary function is to establish effective and harmonious relations between the Generalissimo and General Joseph Stilwell in order to facilitate General Stilwell in the exercise of his authority over the Chinese armies under his command. You will be given further tasks.

Military operations in China against the Japanese had been severely hampered by a lack of cooperation between Stilwell and Chiang, which bordered on personal enmity. The staunch anti-communist Hurley eventually sided with the generalissimo and welcomed it when Stilwell was replaced by General Albert Wedemeyer .

In early November 1944, following the resignation of Ambassador Clarence E. Gauss , Hurley was officially offered the post of ambassador to China, but initially turned it down, stating that the duties entrusted to him in China were the most uncomfortable that he would have ever exercised - and further that he felt that his support for Chiang Kai-shek and the national government of China led to the resistance of the un-American elements in the Foreign Ministry - i.e. That is, those officials who, in his opinion, had too much sympathy for the communists under Mao Zedong - would have increased them against himself. After receiving a telegram from the President on November 17 urging him to accept the post because of the critical nature of the situation, he reluctantly accepted.

Hurley's relations with the State Department did not improve. In addition, the Yalta Conference in February 1945 between President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin resulted in a secret agreement in which, among other things, the Soviet Union was granted concessions in China that Tsarist Russia had lost in the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the century. This, Hurley believed, was the beginning of the end of a non-communist China.

He maintained the hope that after President Roosevelt's death, President Harry S. Truman would recognize what he saw of the errors of Yalta and rectify the situation, but his efforts in that direction were in vain. With a sharp letter dated November 26, 1945, he submitted his resignation.

I have called for the dismissal of the careerists , he wrote, who opposed [official] American policy in the Chinese theater of war. These professional diplomats were ordered back to Washington, DC , [but then] placed in the China and Far East departments of the State Department as my overseers. Some of these same careerists, whose replacement I have arranged, have [now] been assigned to the Supreme Commander in Asia as overseers. In such positions, most of them continue to side with the armed communists and sometimes with the imperialist bloc against American politics.

Political candidacy

Hurley was a Republican candidate for a seat in the US Senate for the state of New Mexico in 1946, 1948, and 1952; however, he lost all three elections to the Democrat Dennis Chavez .

Others

• Besides President Hoover himself, Hurley was the last living member of the Hoover cabinet .

swell

• Army biography
• Russel D. Buhite: Patrick J. Hurley and American Foreign Policy . Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY 1973. ISBN 0-8014-0751-6
• Don Lohbeck: Patrick J. Hurley . Henry Regnery Company, Chicago 1956.

Web links

Commons : Patrick J. Hurley  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Patrick J. Hurley in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Don Lohbeck, Patrick J. Hurley (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956), 280.
2. ↑ Lohbeck, 309.
3. ↑ Lohbeck, 430.