The Foreign Service Journal, October 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2020 57 Gerald Loftus, a retired State Department Foreign Service officer who lives in Brussels, was resident director of the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies from 2010 to 2014. He is the author of Lions at the Legation & Other Tales: Two Centuries of American Diplomatic Life in Tangier (Tangier Legation/Fondation Jardin Majorelle, 2018). In the early 1990s, both as political chief in Algiers and principal officer in Oran, he was in contact with the oppo- sition during Algeria’s first democratic elections, prior to their cancella- tion and ensuing civil war. Mr. Loftus has donated his honorarium for this article to the AFSA Legal Defense Fund in honor of his colleagues who continue to speak truth to power. For the sin of accurately foreseeing the success of Mao Tse-tung’s communist insurgency, Foreign Service “China hands” were accused of disloyalty and punished. BY GERALD LOF TUS M ark Twain, traveling on one of the first American cruise ships, stopped in Tangier, Morocco, in 1867 and called on the American consul. “I would seriously recommend to the government of the United States,” he later wrote in The Innocents Abroad , “that when a man commits a crime so heinous that the law provides no adequate punishment for it, they make him consul general to Tangier.” The life of the lone American diplomat and his family in this North African outpost struck Twain as “the completest exile that I can conceive of.” Almost a century later, Foreign Service Officer John Carter Vincent spent his last assignment (1951-1953) in a sort of political McCARTHYISM REVISITED The Exile of a China Hand John Carter Vincent in Tangier FS HERITAGE exile in Tangier’s International Zone, where a consortium of powers represented by dip- lomats from European and American lega- tions governed what was a city-state prior to Morocco’s independence in 1956. Though never guilty of Twain’s “crime so heinous,” Vincent found himself caught in the vise of McCarthyism, which asked “Who lost China?” to communism. His offense: years of honest Foreign Service reporting fromwartorn China. In the offices of what had become the American legation in Tangier’s medina (walled city), Minister John Carter Vincent—whose other titles were diplomatic agent and consul general—was a world away from the previous focus of his diplo- matic career. A member of what was called the “China Service” (the State Department’s corps of language-trained China experts), Vincent had spent much of the 1920s through the 1940s reporting from a country successively devastated by internecine fighting among warlords and invasion from Japan, then riven by civil war between nationalist and communist forces. In 1945 he was appointed director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, precur- sor to today’s assistant secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific affairs. He was the most senior “China hand” on active duty in the Foreign Service. A self-described “New Deal liberal,” Vincent had come to see Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists as hopelessly corrupt, and The cover of historian Gary May’s definitive biography of FSO John Carter Vincent, published in 1979. NEWREPUBLICBOOKS