Did Truman Curse Chiang Kai-shek as 'SOB and Thieves'? Declassifying FBI Files and New York Probate Court Records

Introduction: An Antisocial Internet Meme and a Post-Mortem Deception

Across online forums in Taiwan Province, extreme partisans routinely weaponize a profanity-laden historical meme as gospel truth. They eagerly parrot explosive phrases such as “they’re all thieves” and “SOB (Son of a Bitch),” accusing former President of the Republic of China Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling of embezzling $750 million in United States aid. Tailored precisely to partisan appetites, these slurs serve as cheap ammunition for keyboard warriors seeking to tear down historical giants.

Yet when stripped of partisan vitriol, the foundational claim collapses under empirical scrutiny.

President Harry S. Truman never cursed Chiang Kai-shek as an “SOB” in any verified historical document, nor did he ever accuse the Chiang family of siphoning off vast sums of US aid. The sole origin of this viral smear is the 1974 bestseller Plain Speaking, authored by American writer Merle Miller. Billed as a collection of candid off-the-record interviews with Truman during his post-presidency, the book depicts Truman as a foul-mouthed cynic launching vulgar tirades against the leadership of the Republic of China.

The fraud’s fatal flaw lies in its calculated chronology.

Truman passed away in December 1972. Miller waited two full years until 1974 before pushing this “oral history” to market. Declassified American archives reveal why: back in 1963, Miller had attempted to publish an article in The Saturday Evening Post containing many of the same manufactured quotes. An outraged, living Truman denounced the drafts as pure fiction and directed his legal counsel to issue a formal ultimatum threatening litigation, forcing Miller to withdraw the manuscript.

While Truman lived, Miller could not publish his fabrications. Miller bided his time until Truman was six feet under, safely unable to object, before stuffing coarse vulgarities and corruption allegations into a dead president’s mouth to secure a million-copy commercial jackpot. Death provided the fabulist with the ultimate shield.

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Strategic Friction: A Scapegoat for Washington’s Diplomatic Failure

A fraudulent book could only achieve widespread resonance because it tapped directly into Washington’s urgent postwar need to deflect foreign policy culpability. It was an exercise in cold, calculated political self-preservation.

Post-WWII Sino-American relations were fraught with profound strategic contradictions. In late 1945, General George C. Marshall arrived in China as presidential special envoy, harboring Washington’s naive ambition to force the anti-communist Government of the Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party into a fragile coalition government. When mediation stalled, Marshall deployed the ultimate diplomatic bludgeon to force concessions: in August 1946, the United States imposed a devastating, ten-month total arms embargo on the Republic of China.

This disastrous policy completely upended the military balance. While National Revolutionary Army forces sustained heavy attrition in Manchuria—paralyzed by ammunition shortages and a total cutoff of US weapon replacement parts—communist forces were systematically supplied with massive stockpiles of surrendered Japanese Kwantung Army weaponry transferred directly by the Soviet Union.

When mediation collapsed, the explosive question “Who lost China?” became a partisan weapon brandished by Republicans against the Truman administration. The White House could never confess its strategic bankruptcy, let alone apologize for the catastrophic arms embargo. To survive domestic electoral pressure, the Truman administration needed a scapegoat. The August 1949 State Department China White Paper established the official deflection: claiming Washington had provided boundless assistance, and blaming the military collapse entirely on internal corruption within the Republic of China.

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Intelligence Audit: The Secret FBI Probe That Found Nothing

Truman did indeed take executive action during his presidency. But the outcome of that action acted like a boomerang, fundamentally demolishing the fabrications of Plain Speaking.

To navigate intense domestic political pressure, Truman wanted definitive evidence of aid diversion pinned on Taipei’s top leadership. Confronted with pervasive rumors—originally seeded by communist disinformation in mainland China—that $750 million in aid had vanished into the private accounts of the Chiang-Soong families, Truman ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of the Treasury to launch a clandestine global financial investigation. Directed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, agents audited American banking accounts, real estate acquisitions, and offshore financial channels.

The result was completely barren.

Following an exhaustive, multi-year financial audit across the United States, the FBI was unable to produce a single indictment or verify any diversion of aid into private accounts. Because the full weight of the American intelligence apparatus uncovered zero evidence of theft, Truman never made—and never could have made—any official or verifiable claim accusing Chiang Kai-shek of embezzlement. If the FBI under Hoover found nothing in the 1950s, the notion that a freelance author decades later could miraculously unearth a confession of embezzlement is historically absurd.

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Judicial Proof: The Probate Settlement of T.V. Soong’s Estate

Cold, hard judicial accounting definitively shatters the myth of “untold personal fortunes.”

Former Premier and Finance Minister T.V. Soong was routinely depicted by Western media sensationalists as the “world’s wealthiest man” and the kingpin of Nationalist corruption. In April 1971, Soong passed away in San Francisco. Given his high-profile diplomatic status, his estate was formally submitted to the Surrogate’s Court of the State of New York and subjected to forensic scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The IRS’s estate audit procedures for high-net-worth foreign figures were ruthlessly thorough; secret offshore accounts, shell entities, and hidden trusts could not escape judicial probate.

When the court’s final accounting was filed, it stunned sensationalist observers. Soong’s non-fixed liquid assets (cash and bank deposits) totaled roughly $1 million. Factoring in his domestic securities, bond portfolios, and modest real estate, his total gross estate was valued between $5 million and $8 million.

Simple mathematics does not lie. A lawful personal estate of $5 million stands in absurd contrast to the wild accusation of a stolen $750 million fortune—a sum equivalent at the time to the foreign exchange reserves of multiple sovereign nations. That magnitude of wealth could not vanish into thin air before the forensic accountants of the IRS. The New York probate decree remains an unassailable legal bulwark against decades of political slander.

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The Reckoning: Academic Discreditation of Merle Miller

While the lie worked its damage in real time—eroding morale and allied trust during the fall of mainland China—the fabulist could not escape the judgment of rigorous historiography.

Following the commercial triumph of Plain Speaking, serious historians bypassed marketing hype and demanded primary evidence. Robert H. Ferrell, distinguished professor of history at Indiana University and a preeminent biographer of Harry S. Truman, traveled to the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, to examine the original audio tapes of Miller’s 1961–1962 interviews.

The archival audit exposed a profound academic fraud: the original tapes contained no “SOB” expletive, no declaration that “they’re all thieves,” and no mention whatsoever of a $750 million embezzlement. On tape, Truman spoke calmly, politely, and cautiously. The vulgar outbursts in the book were entirely invented by Miller out of whole cloth.

Ferrell published his findings in prestigious academic journals, exposing the book as a literary hoax. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David McCullough similarly excoriated Miller’s fabrications in his definitive biography Truman. When Miller died in 1986, his financial royalties could not salvage his ruined professional reputation. Historiography has permanently purged Plain Speaking from the ranks of credible scholarship, relegating it to historical fiction masquerading as oral biography.

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Contemporary Relevance: Let the Declassified Record Speak

Historical reputations must not be forged by supermarket tabloids and malicious internet memes. The standard for discerning historical reality is straightforward: reject partisan emotional blackmail and return to objective documentation.

When the FBI’s declassified files verify that no aid was embezzled, when the New York Surrogate’s Court documents prove the modest reality of Soong’s estate, and when the Truman Library’s original interview tapes catch the author red-handed in fabrication, the internet trolls fixated on the “SOB” slur are left with nothing but empty malice. Rejecting unverified internet folklore and standing firmly on the bedrock of judicial decrees and declassified archives is the essential baseline for restoring historical truth to the Republic of China.