The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

Getting History Wrong I was astonished to read in the May Journal that John Davies, John Vincent and my father, John Service, were Soviet agents. That dubious assertion is contained in a review of M. Stanton Evans’ book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Sena- tor Joseph McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies. Evans is one of that very small group of die- hards who believe Chiang Kai-shek would have prevailed in China had it not been for the reporting and views of Foreign Service officers. However, not even Evans goes so far as to describe Davies, Vincent and Service as Soviet agents. The reviewer, Bob McMahan, alludes to the “many closely held doc- uments” that have become available over the past half century, suggesting by implication that we must now revise our views of bothMcCarthy and those who suffered under what came to be known as McCarthyism. This is misleading. The so-called Venona decryption files of Soviet agents or sources, released in the 1990s, do not include the names of Davies, Vincent or Service. FBI files (which include disinformation from Chiang’s secret police) were available to the State Department and to Senate investigating panels in 1950-1951. With respect to the FSOs victimized by McCarthy, Evans is rehashing old material. Witch-hunting has occurred all too frequently in our history, hurting a lot of innocent people. But we eventual- ly come to our senses and amends are sometimes made. AFSA did so in the case of the China hands at a luncheon at the State Department on Jan. 30, 1973. My father was invited to speak on behalf of the honored FSOs. Historian Barbara Tuchman was the other speaker and titled her remarks “Why Policymakers Do Not Listen.” After noting the high caliber of Foreign Service personnel reporting from China during the war (not limit- ed to the three named above), she said: “The burden of their reports at the time, though not always explicit, was that Chiang Kai-shek was on the way out and the Communists on the way in and that American policy, rather than cling in paralyzed attach- ment to the former, might be well to take this trend into account.” The Foreign Service officers who knew most about China at that time were not listened to. The brief war- time effort to have contact with the Chinese Communists came to an end. Our relations were almost nonexistent for 25 years, which may well have con- tributed to our involvement in both the Korean and Vietnamese Wars. We are not immune to future bouts of McCarthyism. In recounting the past, we ought to be very careful not to lose sight of the serious damage done to individuals and to our national inter- ests by earlier outbreaks. The McMa- han review and the Evans book are not helpful in that regard, to say the least. Robert Service Ambassador, retired Washington, D.C. Smearing the China Hands Bob McMahan’s review of M. Stanton Evans’ latest book, Blacklisted by History , employs smears worthy of Tail Gunner Joe himself. Yes, the USSR had well-placed spies and the threat of Soviet expansionism was very real, but the defense of McCarthy, who was censured by the U.S. Senate 67 to 22, is unmerited. McMahan writes: “The Truman and Eisenhower administrations chose to attack [McCarthy] … instead of re- moving communists from government positions.” For information on Tru- man’s efforts to confront global com- munism, McMahan should Google: Marshall Plan, Berlin Airlift, Truman Doctrine, containment, Korean War and, notably, Executive Order 9835, which ordered the FBI to investigate federal employees for subversion. Was McCarthy “on the right track”? In a speech to a Republican group, McCarthy waved “a list of 205 … members of the Communist Party … working and shaping policy in the State Department.” In a telegram to Truman, he said there were 57 “mem- bers of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring” employed in the State Department. The number shifted to 81 during a Senate speech. In response, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee conducted an investigation as to whether the State Department had employed “disloyal” persons. It determined that the indi- viduals on McCarthy’s list (the one with 81 names) were neither commu- nist nor pro-communist, and that the 6 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 L ETTERS