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By Root 792 0

Service—whom history has recognized as having been right; and not only history, but even, by act if not by acknowledgment, the present administration. Can there be anyone among that group who reported from China during World War II who, watching an American President journey in person to Communist China in 1971, was not conscious of an irony so acute as to make him shiver? Could anyone, remembering past attitudes, look at that picture of President Nixon and Chairman Mao in twin armchairs, with slightly queasy smiles bravely worn to conceal their mutual discomfort, and not feel a stunned sense that truth is indeed weirder than fiction? When I was young, the magazine Vanity Fair used to publish a series called “Impossible Interviews” by the artist-cartoonist Covarrubias in which he confronted Calvin Coolidge with Greta Garbo and John D. Rockefeller, Sr., with Stalin, but last year’s meeting in Peking outdid Covarrubias.

Yet it could have happened twenty-five years earlier, sparing us and Asia immeasurable, and to some degree irreparable, harm, if American policy had been guided by the information and recommendations of the staff of the Chungking Embassy, then acknowledged to be the best-informed service group in China. It included the Ambassador, Clarence Gauss, the Counselor, George Atcheson, both deceased, and among the secretaries and consuls stationed all over China, besides Mr. Service, such men as John Paton Davies, Edward Rice, Arthur Ringwalt, Philip Sprouse, and alternately in the field and on the China Desk, Edmund Clubb and the late John Carter Vincent. Several had been born in China, many were Chinese-speaking, and some are happily here with us today.

For having been right, many of them were persecuted, dismissed, or slowed or blocked in their careers, with whatever damage done to them personally outweighed by damage done to the Foreign Service of the United States. No spectacle, Macaulay said, was so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality—and none, one might add, so mean as the American public in one of its periodic witch-hunts. Your colleagues and predecessors were hounded because able and honest performance of their profession collided with the hysterics of the cold war manipulated by a man so absolutely without principles as to be abnormal, like the man without a shadow. I shall not pursue that story now, however important it is to you and to every citizen, because what I want to get at is a problem perhaps more abiding, and that is: why these men were not listened to even before they were persecuted.

The burden of their reports taken as a whole was that Chiang Kaishek 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 advised to take this trend into account. This was implicit in reports from officers who had no contact with the Communists but were united in describing the deterioration of the Kuomintang. It was made explicit by those who saw the Communists at first hand, like Service in his remarkable reports from Yenan, and Ludden, who journeyed into the interior to observe the functioning of Communist rule, and Davies, whose ear was everywhere. They were unequivocal in judging the Communists to be the dynamic party in the country; in Davies’ words in 1944, “China’s destiny was not Chiang’s but theirs.” This was not subversion, as our Red-hunters were to claim, but merely observation.

Any government that does not want to walk open-eyed into a quagmire, leading its country with it, would presumably re-examine its choices at such a point. That, after all, is what we employ Foreign Service officers for: to advise policy-makers of actual conditions on which to base a realistic program. The agonizing question is: Why are their reports ignored, why is there a persistent gap between observers in the field and policy-makers in the capital? While I cannot speak from experience, I would like to try to offer some answers as an outside assessor.

In the first place, policy is formed