F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

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 Department
and leaned heavily on the military
because the military tend to be brisk, cando
problem-solvers while senior Foreign
Service officers tend to be “skeptical examiners
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, without
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 original
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 foreign
policy, which I would define as the
conduct of relations and exercise of influence
so as best to serve an enlightened
self-interest.
The question remains, what can be
done to narrow the gap between information
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 imperative.
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. ■
Eight separate panels
would investigate and
clear Davies of
disloyalty before State
finally dismissed him on
Nov. 4, 1954.
— 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 colleagues
mostly preserved an embarrassed
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 reinforce
this quiescence, Dulles appointed
Loy Henderson, a man who had
“impeccable credentials with the
McCarthyites,” as under secretary for
administration, to exercise only nominal
supervision over Security
Director Scott McLeod (whose
motto was “an ounce of security is
worth a pound of brains”). The striking
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 extraordinarily
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 historian
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 interventions
on Davies’ behalf that he undertook,
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 subsequently
wrote letters to Time magazine
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
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