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Patrick J. Hurley
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Patrick Jay Hurley (January 8, 1883 – July 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.[1] After the war, he returned to Tulsa, where he continued to enhance his political and business profile. After Hurley chaired Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign in Oklahoma, Hoover appointed him Assistant Secretary of War in 1929. He was shortly promoted to Secretary of War following the death of James W. Good in November and served until Hoover left office in 1933. He was recalled from private life in 1941 following American entry in to World War II and promoted to brigadier general. He served as a personal diplomatic representative for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in China, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union, becoming the first foreigner granted Soviet permission to visit the Eastern Front, and was briefly United States Minister to New Zealand in 1942.[2]
In 1944, Roosevelt appointed Hurley as United States Ambassador to China. He was tasked with mediating the factions of the Chinese Civil War in order to unify the country against the Empire of Japan. Hurley came to strongly favor the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek in the conflict, believing that they could win both the civil war and war with Japan with sufficient American support. He was also critical of British and European imperialism in the region. Frustrated by concessions to the Soviet Union at the Yalta Conference and believing that Communist victory in China was inevitable, Hurley resigned in 1945 and publicized his concerns that high-ranking members of the State Department were too sympathetic to the Chinese communist cause.
Returning to the United States, Hurley settled in New Mexico, where he became a leader of the New Mexico Republican Party. He was unsuccessfully nominated for as a candidate United States Senate in 1946, 1948, and 1952 and founded the United Western Minerals Company. He died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1963.
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