F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

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 Diplomacy
in Asia ignores the Foreign
Service China hands.
Kahn is one of a long series of journalists
who have found Davies a compelling
subject. He returned the
favor, admitting that “on the whole, I
found newsmen more engaging and
stimulating than most of my colleagues.”
The list of distinguished
journalists who were his friends
includes at least three Pulitzer Prize
winners:
Theodore H. White. Best remembered
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 reporting
entirely — a decision he later confessed
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
Stilwell 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 finally
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
With the exception of
George Kennan and a
few others, his Foreign
Service colleagues
mostly preserved an
embarrassed silence.
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 realized,
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’ dismissal
because of an alleged “lack of
judgment, discretion and reliability.”
Four days later, an outraged Eric
Sevareid used his nationally syndicated
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 official
disgrace … dismissed, three
years short of retirement and pension,
after giving 23 years of his life
JULY-AUGUST 2008/FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 49