The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

Service Officers and What Befell Them , provides a gripping account. Despite its title, James Lilley’s more recent China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplo- macy in Asia ignores the Foreign Service China hands. Kahn is one of a long series of jour- nalists who have found Davies a com- pelling subject. He returned the favor, admitting that “on the whole, I found newsmen more engaging and stimulating than most of my col- leagues.” The list of distinguished journalists who were his friends includes at least three Pulitzer Prize winners: Theodore H. White. Best re- membered today for his Making of the President series, White was a noted war correspondent for Time magazine in China, and became one of Davies’ closest friends. His experience as a witness on Davies’ behalf before a State Department Security Hearing Board in 1954 was so traumatic for him that he abandoned foreign report- ing entirely — a decision he later con- fessed made him “ashamed.” Barbara Wertheim. Better known under her married name, Barbara Tuchman, she got to know Davies and Stilwell as a 23-year-old correspondent in China. She won Pulitzer Prizes in history for both S tilwell and the American Experience in China 1911-1945 (for which Davies was a key source) and The Guns of August . She was the featured speaker at the AFSA luncheon in January 1973, when the Foreign Service final- ly honored the China hands, “a group of Foreign Service officers … whom history has recognized as having been right.” (See sidebar, p. 50.) David Halberstam. In The Best and the Brightest , the late journalist calls Davies “the best of a generation of Asian experts” and sees the loss of the insights he and his colleagues could have provided as contributing to the U.S. failure in Vietnam (a point Tuchman and other historians have made). An extended character sketch in Chapter 18 is perhaps the most rounded portrait we have of Davies, pending publication of a long-overdue full-scale biography. The Response to Davies’ Dismissal It took nearly a decade for Hurley’s bellowed threat to be real- ized, but not for lack of trying: Eight separate panels would investigate and clear Davies of disloyalty. But on Nov. 4, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced Davies’ dis- missal because of an alleged “lack of judgment, discretion and reliability.” Four days later, an outraged Eric Sevareid used his nationally syndicat- ed broadcast to issue a pungent rejoinder: “I have known a great number of men around the world, under all manner of circumstances. I have known none who seemed more the whole man … all that a man should be — in modesty and thoughtfulness, in resourcefulness and steady strength of character. The name of this man is John Paton Davies. He is the man Secretary of State Dulles … has just broken on the wheel of offi- cial disgrace … dismissed, three years short of retirement and pen- sion, after giving 23 years of his life J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49 With the exception of George Kennan and a few others, his Foreign Service colleagues mostly preserved an embarrassed silence.