Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [168]
The question remains, what can be done to narrow the gap between information from the field and policy-making at home? First, it remains 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.
By a circuitous route I come to Jack Service, the focus of this meeting.
Mr. Service was born in China in the province of Szechuan, the son of missionary parents serving with the YMCA. His youth was spent in China until he returned to the United States to attend Oberlin College, from which he graduated in 1932. He also acquired a classmate as wife and anyone who knows Caroline Service will recognize this as an early example of Jack’s good judgment. After passing the Foreign Service exams, he returned to China because no openings were available during the Depression, and entered the profession by way of a clerk’s job in Kunming. Commissioned as a Foreign Service officer in 1935, he served in Peking and Shanghai, and joined the Embassy in Chungking in 1941. During the war years he served half his time in the field, seeing realities outside the miasma of the capital. This opportunity culminated when after being attached to Stilwell’s staff, he served as political officer with the American Military Observers Mission to Yenan, the first official American contact with the Communists. His series of conversations with Mao, Chou En-lai, Chu Teh, Lin Piao, and other leaders, embodied in vivid almost verbatim reports with perceptive comments, are a historical source of prime and unique importance. Equally impressive are the examples that show Service passionately trying to persuade and convince the policymakers, as in the brief prepared for Vice-President Wallace in June 1944 and the famous group telegram to the Department, largely drafted by Service—a desperate effort by the Embassy staff to halt the Hurley drift down the rapids with Chiang Kai-shek. If there was passion in this, it was at least informed passion.
Following arrest in the Amerasia affair in 1945, Service was exonerated and cleared, and promoted in 1948 to Class 2 officer—only to be plunged back under all the old charges in 1949 when the Communist victory in China set off our national hysteria and put Senator McCarthy, in strange alliance with the China Lobby, in charge of the American soul. If Chiang Kai-shek were to keep American support, it was imperative that the “loss” of China, so-called, should be seen as no failure from inside but the work of some outside subversive conspiracy. That specter exactly fitted certain native American needs. Along with others, Service suffered the consequences. Despite a series of acquittals, he was pinned with a doubt of loyalty and dismissed from the Foreign Service by Secretary Dean Acheson in 1951, as Davies and Vincent were subsequently dismissed by Secretary Dulles. Six years of pursuing redress through the courts finally brought a unanimous verdict in his favor by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1957. He rejoined the Foreign Service, but was kept out of any assignment that would use his knowledge and experience of China. When it was clear that the Kennedy administration would offer no better, Service resigned in 1962 and has