The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

efforts, Kennan himself was hauled before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, an experience he describes as “traumatic” and “Kaf- kaesque.” Kennan was among the first fig- ures to draw attention to the dangers of the McCarthyite onslaught — not just to the targeted individuals, or to civil liberties, but to the integrity of the Foreign Service itself. His July 1955 Foreign Affairs article, “The Future of Our Professional Diplo- macy,” states in stark terms his fears for the morale and effectiveness of the career Service under a security regime he suggested had been inspired by “the totalitarians.” When Averell Harriman described the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, which he took over in late 1961, as “a disas- ter area filled with human wreckage,” and when John F. Kennedy called the State Department a “bowl of jelly,” they were bluntly confirming the cogency of Kennan’s analysis. In one of the great ironies of Cold War history, it fell to the prosecutor of Alger Hiss and scourge of liberals, Richard M. Nixon, to pick up the pol- icy threads that the China hands had tried to weave and finally permit the lifting of the cloud of suspicion hang- ing over their heads. Davies probably flashed one of his sardonic smiles when he learned that one of the few prestigious journalists to win a covet- ed spot on the presidential plane car- rying Nixon to his historic meeting with Mao was his old friend and defender, Eric Sevareid. Since AFSA paid tribute to the China hands a third of a century ago, their reputation has been further enhanced and that of their detractors further diminished. In 1973, many bemoaned the consequences of their loss to American diplomacy. Surely it is time now to be more positive and emphasize their enduring importance as role models for a 21st-century Foreign Service. n 52 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8