F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

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 Senator
Joseph McCarthy and His Fight
Against America’s Enemies. Evans is
one of that very small group of diehards
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 documents”
that have become available
over the past half century, suggesting
by implication that we must now
revise our views of both McCarthy 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-
6 FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL/JULY-AUGUST 2008
LETTERS
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 limited
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 attachment
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 wartime
effort to have contact with the
Chinese Communists came to an end.
Our relations were almost nonexistent
for 25 years, which may well have contributed
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 interests
by earlier outbreaks. The McMahan
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 removing
communists from government
positions.” For information on Truman’s
efforts to confront global communism,
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 “members
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 individuals
on McCarthy’s list (the one
with 81 names) were neither communist
nor pro-communist, and that the