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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
department had an effective security program. It labeled McCarthy’s charges a “hoax and fraud.” McCarthy charged President Truman and the Democrats with “20 years of treason.” He accused Secretary of State George Marshall of joining “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.” He called Secretary Dean Acheson “the Red Dean.” And those were powerful men. Thousands of reputations and the financial security of many less prominent families were ruined by the unsubstantiated charges, bullying and, yes, blacklisting employed by Mc- Carthy and his acolytes. Yet McMahan downplays these as merely “disagreeable tactics.” Truman rightly referred to Mc- Carthy as “the best asset the Kremlin has.” The McCarthyites blackened our name around the globe, giving aid and comfort to the enemy — while finding precious few real internal enemies. Dana Deree FSO Consulate General Tijuana Editor’s Note: For more on the China hands and Joe McCarthy, see this month’s FS Heritage column, “‘Grace Under Pressure’: John Paton Davies” (p. 46). Defending Us Richard Hoover’s letter in the May FSJ, “Defending the U.S.,” asserts that “no U.S. diplomat worth his salt would permit an insult to his country to go unanswered.” Who could disagree with that? Well, in my last overseas assignment, Pakistan, and many other posts, if I had spent every waking hour of every day answering outrageous insults and uninformed diatribes, I would never have done anything else. Further, some of our severest critics were those who were also admirers L ETTERS of the U.S., but believed that U.S. foreign policy had gone wrong. Responding to those people in kind would have cut off any deeper communication. Some of them were open to a genuine dialogue but never had one with us, because the embassy considered them enemies. Of course, unjustified attacks are infuriating and often must be answered quickly and forcefully. But we have to leave it to the people on the scene to make the call on whether to respond, and in what manner. I tried, not always successfully, to correct factual errors immediately and engage the critic in a deeper dialogue, through personal contact and USIS programs. But some critics are beyond the pale — real American-haters — and in those cases we have to contest the message and ignore the messenger. Bill Lenderking FSO, retired Washington, D.C. Cooperation for Africa Congratulations on your May survey of the U.S. role in Africa over the past 50 years, especially the important articles by Hank Cohen and Bob Gribbin surveying the goals of U.S. policy during and after the Cold War and describing the envisaged role of AFRICOM. Overall, the United States has indeed sought to help African postcolonial economic development, encourage democratic change and respond to humanitarian catastrophes. But Cohen’s acknowledgment of our failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda and inability to do more to prevent genocide in Darfur, in part because of U.S. engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, is an important reminder that Africa still remains a low priority. I want to highlight two points not discussed sufficiently in these articles. First is the importance of working closely with our European partners, especially the United Kingdom and France, as well as the European Union, to provide coordinated economic, political and security support to the African Union and regional economic communities (ECOWAS, SADC, etc.). We are long past the time of Franco-American or British- American rivalry in Africa, so U.S. programs such as ACRI, ACOTA and AFRICOM need to be closely integrated with parallel European efforts if they are to be useful. The absorptive capacity of African continental and regional organizations, and African states, is severely strained by our insistence that they deal bilaterally with separate U.S. programs and initiatives. Second, a main goal of the African Union and African political and military leaders is the establishment of an African Standby Force by 2010. This may take somewhat longer, but planning is well advanced. The ASF will consist of five regional brigades under the overall command of the African Union, and will be expected to deploy, perhaps in coordination with U.N. peacekeeping forces, to restore order and end the violence in the event of a regional or internal conflict. AFRICOM should be structured to support this African-led effort, not only to deal bilaterally with favored countries. Such support would help greatly to reduce the suspicion and reservations prevalent today on the continent about our objectives. Most importantly, it would contribute substantially to our stated goal of giving African political and military leaders the capacity to manage and resolve their conflicts more effectively than has been the case to date. John L. Hirsch Ambassador, retired International Peace Institute New York, N.Y. JULY-AUGUST 2008/FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 7
Page 1: A TIRELESS “AFSA-CATE” ■ HONO
Page 6 and 7: CONTENTS AFSA NEWS DISSENTERS HONOR
Page 10 and 11: Forgetting History The April Cybern
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Page 14 and 15: Saharan Africa, where the number of
Page 16 and 17: Association for Diplomatic Studies
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Page 22 and 23: aircraft was an American flag carri
Page 24 and 25: of State’s attention to managemen
Page 26 and 27: In recent months, the growing secur
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Page 32 and 33: setup, relying on elected provincia
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Page 40 and 41: institutional memory, as well as th
Page 42 and 43: ise of the Taliban. This has been b
Page 44 and 45: Durand Line broke the region’s do
Page 46 and 47: Center, that the TTP is bound to re
Page 48 and 49: On Sept. 7, 1948, Secretary of Stat
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authority and against the advice of
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AFSANEWS American Foreign Service A
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V.P. VOICE: STATE ■ BY STEVE KASH
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2008 AFSA CONSTRUCTIVE DISSENT AWAR
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2008 AFSA CONSTRUCTIVE DISSENT AWAR
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2008 AFSA OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE A
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AUSTIN TRACY Scholarship Winners Ho
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AFSA Issue Brief Foreign Service Re
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CLASSIFIEDS JULY-AUGUST 2008/FOREIG
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Cultural Diplomacy’s Finest Hour
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Lucius Durham Battle, 89, a retired
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ing French and Spanish literature a
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Comforts, that specialized in anima
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Washington, D.C., in 1941. There sh
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losing a battle with cancer. Born i
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Leasing and Management of Exception
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Seven months ago, I was living in a
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