The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

the power of time to whiten. Stewart Alsop made the interesting point Sunday [Jan. 28, 1973] in the New York Times Book Review that American presidents since Roosevelt have disliked the State Depart- ment and leaned heavily on the military because the military tend to be brisk, can- do problem-solvers while senior Foreign Service officers tend to be “skeptical exam- iners of the difficulties”; and worried, uncertain presidents will prefer positive to negative advice. You will notice that this reliance on military advice coincides with the era of air power and has much to do, I think, with the enormous attraction of the easy solution — the idea that a horrid problem can be solved from the air, with- out contact, without getting mixed up in a long, dirty business on the ground. … The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the communist monolith. We now discover happily, if belatedly, that the supposed Sino-Soviet unity is, in fact, a bitter antagonism of two rivals wrapped in hate, fear and mutual suspicion. Our orig- inal judgment never had much to do with facts, but was rather a reflection of fears and prejudices. Knee-jerk reactions of this kind are not the best guide to a useful for- eign policy, which I would define as the conduct of relations and exercise of influ- ence so as best to serve an enlightened self-interest. The question remains, what can be done to narrow the gap between informa- tion from the field and policymaking at home. First, it is essential to maintain the integrity of Foreign Service reporting, not only for the sake of what may get through, but to provide the basis for a change of policy when the demand becomes impera- tive. Second, some means must be found to require that preconceived notions and emotional fixations be periodically tested against the evidence. Perhaps legislation could be enacted to enforce a regular pause for rethinking, for questioning the wisdom of an accepted course of action, for cutting one’s losses if necessary. n 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 51 — and almost life itself — in the arduous service of his government. Eight times he was investigated … One by one the politically inspired charges of communism, disloyalty or perjury were dropped; the ninth board came up with something new, called defects of character. Mr. Davies is not, concluded the board and Mr. Dulles, of sufficient judgment, discretion and reliability. Sufficient, one may ask, unto what? Their test can only have been of supernatural design. I saw their victim measured against the most severe tests that mortal man can design. Those he passed. At the head of the class.” Unlike the many journalists and editorial writers who came to Davies’ defense, his Foreign Service col- leagues mostly preserved an embar- rassed silence. The department’s legal adviser, who was assisting Davies and other China hands in preparing their defense, commented in disgust that State was a “gutless place.” To rein- force this quiescence, Dulles appoint- ed Loy Henderson, a man who had “impeccable credentials with the McCarthyites,” as under secretary for administration, to exercise only nomi- nal supervision over Secur- ity Director Scott McLeod (whose motto was “an ounce of security is worth a pound of brains”). The strik- ing exception to this timidity was the FSO who was in the best position to attest not only to Davies’ character, but to his loyalty and professional integrity: George Kennan. Kennan and Davies had first met in the spring of 1937, when Davies visited the embassy in Moscow and was invited to lunch by Kennan and his wife Anneliese. Davies later said of the lunch, which took place as Stalin’s show trials were occurring, “This was the first lesson in Russian psychology and communist politics that I was to receive from an extraor- dinarily gifted colleague, teacher and friend.” Kennan, for his part, admired Davies’ “broad, sophisticated and skeptical political understanding, without an ounce of pro-communist sympathies.” He was delighted to have Davies join his staff in Moscow in January 1945, where he became, in Kennan’s words, “a rock of strength.” He would also be the first person Kennan asked to join the new Policy Planning Office in Washington when it was established with Kennan as director on April 29, 1947. The two men worked very closely together until Kennan’s resignation as director on Dec. 31, 1949. In the view of Wilson Miscamble, the leading histo- rian of the Policy Planning Office staff, Davies was an “equal partner in helping frame Kennan’s policy advice on China, Japan and Southeast Asia.” In the chapter on McCarthyism in the second volume of his memoirs, Kennan relates six separate interven- tions on Davies’ behalf that he under- took, beginning in the summer of 1951, when he paid his own way back from Europe to testify for Davies at two separate hearings. Despite being discouraged by the department from making his views public, he subse- quently wrote letters to Time maga- zine and the New York Times , and gave a widely reported speech on the dangers of McCarthyism at Notre Dame University. As a result of these Eight separate panels would investigate and clear Davies of disloyalty before State finally dismissed him on Nov. 4, 1954.