The Foreign Service Journal, March 2011

B ack in the 1960s, I asked an older Foreign Service officer why there had not been an uproar within the Department of State when John S. Service and John Paton Davies Jr. were subjected to seven and nine Loyalty Board hearings, respectively. His answer still haunts me today, a half-century later: “You don’t know what it was like in the Department of State in the 1950s. Saying something would almost surely cost you your job, your career.” I initially ascribed the anguish in his voice to fear. Looking back on it now, though, I think it was actually shame that he, and others like him, had looked the other way. Service and Davies, both supremely capable Foreign Service officers, were accused of being communist dupes if not actual communists. Some State of- ficials apparently gambled that setting up a star chamber to examine their loy- alty would head off calls for closer scrutiny of the Foreign Service. They were wrong. The first Loyalty Board to examine Jack Service found him to be a loyal public servant. So did the next five. Fi- nally, with the seventh board, State got what it wanted. He was held to lack the loyalty required of the nation’s Foreign Service officers and was discharged. The son of American missionaries in China, Service spoke and knew Chi- nese, and the country, in a way that few Americans ever achieve. Being a China hand was his life’s work, so cashiering him was an act of cruelty akin to taking away the baseball from Willie Mays or depriving Pablo Picasso of a paintbrush. You don’t know what it was like. Imagine, if you can, seeing colleagues in the hallways of State turn the other way lest they be condemned by association for speaking with you. Or worse, telling you surreptitiously that they supported you but just couldn’t say it out loud. Contemplate the desolation of being locked out of your career. Try to feel the stark loneliness of being obliged to shoulder the blame. Sure, eventually the Supreme Court determined that Jack Service had been unjustly deprived of his livelihood. But denied promotions, he finished out his career as consul in Liverpool. I once asked him, “Why did you go through seven Loyalty Boards, and then the courts?” With barely a pause, he said, “Because the Foreign Service is too important to be left in the hands of those people.” In August 1968, when the FSJ pub- lished an article by Henry B. Day re- calling John Davies and quoting Eric Sevareid’s poignant 1954 condemnation of his dismissal from the Foreign Serv- ice, I was inspired to write a letter to the editor on the importance of standing up for what is right. “Fifteen years is a long time to wait for even a small measure of justification and/or sympathy from one’s colleagues for 23 years of life cut short by … whom? There will always be people to staff that ninth Loyalty Board, but it is up to the rest of us to make sure that there are not any 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd and 2nd loyalty boards,” I wrote. “In the new Foreign Service Club building [then under consideration], will there be one small plaque to mark those men like Davies and Service who believed so much in our Foreign Serv- ice that they would take all the abuse and still fight to stay?” Some months later, I received a packet in the mail. Inside was a China Research monograph, The Amerasia Papers: Some Problems in the History of U.S.-China Relations , from Jack Serv- ice. It was inscribed, “For David Hughes, with gratitude for a generous remark boldly made in a public place.” I have thought about those words for many years, and about the courage it took these heroes to go to bed each night, and get up the next morning, to struggle to right a terrible wrong—and to have to do it alone. Will the Foreign Service display more courage the next time the Know- Nothings come calling? ■ David Hughes is a retired FSO. Contemplate the desolation of being locked out of your career. 68 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 1 R EFLECTIONS Saying It Out Loud B Y D AVID H UGHES