The Foreign Service Journal, January 2010

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 55 where the situation was not unlike that in China during the 1940s, Service ob- served, issuing a cautionary notice that remains valid today: “If we keep our- selves in ignorance and out of touch with new popular movements and po- tentially revolutionary situations, we may find ourselves again missing the boat. The proper measure of such re- porting should not be popular senti- ment in the United States as reflected in some segments of the press, or by some congressional committees not charged with foreign relations. … The legacy of Senator Joe McCarthy still needs, in some respects, to be shed.” Reading Honorable Survivor, one cannot help but reflect on more recent foreign policy challenges — Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan— where a genuine comprehension of de- velopments in a distant land could make all the difference for effective policymaking. Lynne Joiner, an award-winning broadcast journalist, news anchor and documentary filmmaker, is currently a media consultant for Shanghai Inter- national TV Channel. She was first in- troduced to the story of John Service in a Chinese political science class at Cor- nell University. As a young broadcast journalist during the 1970s, she had the opportunity to visit China with a con- gressional delegation and made a doc- umentary film about the trip. Months later, at a Stanford Univer- sity conference on U.S.-China rela- tions, she met Service and his wife. Their shared professional interest in China developed into a decades-long personal friendship, whose warmth and spirit animates this lively and exten- sively documented work. ■ Susan Brady Maitra is the Journal ’s senior editor. B O O K S