The Foreign Service Journal, March 2014

28 MARCH 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Everyone was upset. There wasn’t much to do. I called [my attorney] Ed, and he immediately asked for a delay. Ed felt very strongly that we had a case, that the Loyalty Review Board did not have this authority to overrule cases that had been decided in favor of the employee. They could be an appeal board, but since the State Department had not appealed, they couldn’t arbitrarily assume control of a case, as they were doing, and then decide against the employee. [But State] refused to consider any delay or hold it up: “Too late. Press has already got these releases.” The State Depart- ment had a lengthy press release, the full text of the Loyalty Review Board’s decision, and the full text of their own board’s decision, saying that I would be fired as of the close of busi- ness the next day. v W e don’t know for sure, but as far as we could find out, the State Department immediately got in touch with the White House and said, “What do we do?” The White House said, “You’ve got to fire him. Too much heat. The president has appointed the Loyalty Review Board, he can’t overrule them, and you’ve just got to go ahead and fire him.” The whole attitude of the State Department people under Dean Acheson was to save the Secretary as much as possible because he’d been burned so badly on the [Alger] Hiss case, you see. After Hiss was convicted, he made a statement, “I will not turn my back.” The repercussions and backlash on this had been venomous and terrible. One of McCarthy’s favorite ways of referring to me, for instance, in public speeches was, “John Service, whom Ache- son will not turn his back on.” You know, this sort of thing. I’m not sure whether Acheson was involved. I suppose he must have okayed it. A group of Foreign Service officers tried to talk to him about the case. I think he intimated to them that he just couldn’t do anything about it, his hands were tied. So I think it all points to the fact that the real decision was made in the White House. I don’t think I was used as the [State] Department scape- goat. There’s just no basis for that. The department, as I say, was pretty much on my side. The State Department at the top level tried to cut its losses at the last minute. They weren’t going to make any fight about it. But up to that point they had stuck by me through a lot of thick and thin. I was a scapegoat in a sense, a whipping boy… [but] that isn’t the right word. I turned out to be an easy, vulnerable target for McCarthy and for the China Lobby. n 1960s: More Talk than Peace Widely hailed as one of the outstanding professional diplomats of his generation, Philip C. Habib (1920-1992) served as deputy assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 1967 to 1969. He later served as ambassador to South Korea (1971–1974), assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs (1974–1976), and under secretary of State for political affairs (1976–1978). After retiring from the Foreign Service, Ambassador Habib was twice recalled to duty, first as a special adviser and then, in 1981, as a special envoy to mediate the Lebanese civil war. In this section of his ADST oral history, Amb. Habib recalls his role on the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Talks, which began in 1968 and finally concluded in 1973 with the agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam. v F romour standpoint, we were willing to go for a total bombing halt, but we wanted to get a proper negotiation going including the South Vietnamese. We had South Vietnamese liaison guys there in Paris. But the actual negotiations were between us and the North Vietnamese. We had two levels of negotiations. For the formal talks everyThursday, we would convene at the Majestic Hotel at Avenue Kléber. The delegation would file into this magnificent conference hall, and we’d sit there and read statements to each other, and go out and talk to the TV cameras, and go back to the office andmeet again the next Thursday. Well, that went on for a while, and obviously we weren’t going to do anything under that spotlight, so we had a couple of private meetings, and then we set up the formal secret negotiations. They had a safe house, and we had a safe house. Nobody knew, nobody had a clue where they were. They knew that something was wrong, but couldn’t figure out what. I remember one CBS reporter said, “Nowwe’ve figured it out, you’re meeting on a houseboat on the Seine.” Yes, that’s right, on a houseboat, you get a rowboat and follow us out. They never discovered it, and why? We ran it, we were professionals. Nothing ever leaked from them, or fromus. We had a whole series of good meetings. Cy Vance and I had carried onmost of the secret negotiations. We would bring Averell Harriman in for the key ones. Cy and I had meeting after meeting, and a couple of times I hadmeetings alone, at the last stages when we were drafting terms in getting the agree- Philip C. Habib was one of six distinguished American diplomats honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a commemorative stamp in 2006.