The purge of John Service from the US State Department caused a blindness in US policy on China for four decades that altered the course of history. The impact is still being
felt by young State officiers who continue to think twice before filing reports that conflicts with the official line. His story is one of personal courage and tragedy. His loyal service to his country was the only reason for his downfall. Service was highly respected in China.
Henry C.K. Liu
February 4, 1999
John Service, Purged 'China Hand,' Dies at 89
By JOHN KIFNER
John Service, the first of the "old China hands" purged from the State Department in the McCarthy era, died Wednesday in Oakland, Calif. He was 89.
As a young Foreign Service officer in World War II he filed prescient reports on the rival forces battling the occupying Japanese -- Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalists and Mao Tse-tung's Communists, and observed the corruption and weakness of the former. But after the war, as what became known as the China lobby swung U.S. policy strongly behind the failing Chiang government -- the Communists gained full control of the mainland in 1949, driving the remaining nationalists to Taiwan -- much of the blame fell
on what was said at the time to be a pro-Soviet conspiracy in the State Department.
"Who lost China?" became a major election slogan that shaped U.S. political life for many years. It helped make the careers of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon and, according to some historians, helped shape U.S. involvement in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
He once predicted wryly that although he never used his middle name, only the initial, his obituary would identify him not only as an official once accused of espionage, but as ''John Stewart Service."
The accusers of those men spelled out their full names, and so they went down in history: John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, John Paton Davies, Oliver Edmund Clubb. All were forced out of the Foreign Service. All were eventually vindicated but neither they nor, some thought, the Foreign Service itself, ever fully recovered.
Their ordeal actually began during World War II in the efforts of a U.S. mission led by Gen. Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell to expand the Chinese war effort against Japan. The China experts traveling through the areas controlled by various warlords reported that Chiang's Nationalist party, the Kuomintang, was dragging its feet, reserving its U.S.-supplied arms for an eventual showdown with the Communists.
The old China hands predicted that in such a fight, the Communists would win.
They called instead for American pressure on Chiang to reform his government and direct his forces against the Japanese, in cooperation with the Communists and under
American command.
"Selfish and corrupt, incapable and obstructive," were a few of the words Service used to describe the Chiang government in a 1944 memo to Stilwell that urged that the United States insist the general be appointed to lead all the Chinese forces.
Like many of his generation of China hands, Service was born in China of missionary parents. His had founded a YMCA branch in Chengdu, where he was born on Aug. 8, 1909.
He grew up in Sichuan province, attended high school in Shanghai and studied art history at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he also was captain of the track team.
Returning to China in 1932, he married an Oberlin classmate, Caroline Schulz, the daughter of an Army officer. After a brief stint in a bank, Service joined the Foreign Service, and when the Japanese entered Beijing, he escorted American refugees through the lines to safety.
He was assigned to the new Nationalist capital at Chongqing as a political officer in 1941. His job was to gather information from all factions and parties, including the Communists. As political officers do today, he gave briefings to visiting American journalists, including Theodore White and Eric Sevareid. Those activities were later cast in a controversial light.
A lifelong amateur runner, Service hiked around China with a sleeping bag, eating as well as he could off the land. E.J. Khan Jr. in his book "The China Hands," quotes a State Department colleague as saying: "Jack had uncanny instincts. He could walk along a Chinese street and by the kind of matches sold or the clothing worn or the food being cooked could analyze the structure of the local society."
As the war progressed, Service warned that a civil war was widely regarded as inevitable, under conditions that would lead to an undemocratic, probably pro-Soviet Communist government.
In July 1944, assigned as a State Department adviser to Stilwell, he finally managed to get to Mao's headquarters in Yanan. He wrote that he felt he had "come into a
different country," one marked by hard work, cooperation and "the absence of banditry."
Recording his first impressions, he wrote: "There is an absence of show and formality, both in speech and action. Relations of the officials and people toward us, and of the Chinese themselves, are open, direct and friendly. Mao Tse-tung and other leaders are universally spoken of with respect (amounting in the case of Mao to a kind of veneration)."
This was in sharp contrast to the "crisis" of the Chiang government he described in an crucial memo to Stilwell that Oct. 11.
"Recent defeats have exposed exposed its military ineffectiveness and will hasten the approaching economic disaster," he wrote.
But the memo was reportedly leaked to the Nationalist government. The powerful
China lobby back home was furious, and both Stilwell and Service were recalled to Washington. President Franklin Roosevelt replaced Stilwell as his personal envoy with Gen. Patrick Hurley.
Service got back to China as an army adviser, visiting both sides, but was soon in trouble again. He drafted a letter, signed by the rest of the diplomatic staff in the Nationalist capital, Chongqing, urging that the United States provide aid to the Communists in order to reduce casualties in an expected Allied invasion from the sea. Hurley charged betrayal and got him recalled, this time for good.
Waiting for reassignment in Washington in April 1945, Service received a phone
call from Mark Gayn a freelance journalist who was at the time working for Amerasia, a tiny left-wing magazine with strong views on China, Chiang and Mao similar to Service's own.
Service met several times with Gayn and Amerasia's editor-publisher, Philip Jaffe, and lent them copies of some of his reports, a few of which he himself had classified as secret. He later agreed with his accusers that this was an indiscretion, but contended that it was common procedure.
Amerasia was under surveillance by the FBI, and agents had repeatedly entered its offices and several apartments, and had taken or photographed documents, including those provided by Service.
A grand jury looking into the question of whether documents had been illegally
obtained voted unanimously against indicting Service. Others were indicted, and as the result of a plea bargain some were fined and one case was dismissed.
The effects of the case endured, however. The Chinese Communists treated it as
proof of American hostility. To American supporters of Chiang it was proof of an anti-Nationalist conspiracy in the State Department. And in the ensuing years, the right
would charge that there was a cover up in the case.
In 1996, a book, based on recently released FBI files suggested there had indeed been a fix in the case, but not the kind the right had charged. In "The Amerasia Spy Case" (University of North Carolina Press) Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh wrote that
Thomas (Tommy the Cork) Corcoran, the prominent former New Dealer turned Washington fixer, had a hand in the case, lobbying the Justice Department to go easy on Service.
One of Corcoran's clients was Chiang's government, and he feared that if Service went on trial, like-minded State Department advisers and, above all, Stilwell --
who was under a presidential gag order -- would testify about corruption and other failures of the Nationalists.
Cleared by a State Department loyalty board -- by his count he would eventually pass nine such inquiries -- Service was to go to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo. But as the cold war sharpened and the Chiang government disintegrated, the search for culprits intensified. Other espionage cases, the Alger Hiss affair, the Soviet explosion of an atom bomb and the Korean war made the dispute even more bitter.
On the night of Feb. 9, 1950, McCarthy held up a sheaf of paper during a speech in Wheeling, W.Va., and declared, "I have here in my hands a list of 205, known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department."
Pressed in Congress, McCarthy, R-Wis., eventually produced 14 names, among them that of Service, who he charged was a "a known associate and collaborator with Communists."
He was cleared by a Senate committee, which declared that he should not be penalized "by destroying his career and branding him as disloyal for writing what appears to have been the true facts as he saw them."
But on Dec. 13, 1951, a Loyalty Review Board named by President Truman ruled there was "reasonable doubt as to his loyalty." Secretary of State Dean Acheson dismissed him the same day.
He fought the ruling, and in 1956 the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that the presidential board had no right to review the State Department's findings and that Acheson had no right to dismiss him. To the surprise of many, he rejoined the State Department and retired from an obscure post in the Liverpool consulate in 1962.
At 53, Service enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, received a master's degree and became library curator of its Center for Chinese Studies. With the
thaw in Chinese-U.S. relations in the early 1970s, he was able to revisit China several times.
He published several books on China, including a volume of his wartime dispatches, "Last Chance in China" (Random House, 1974.).
He is survived by three children, Victoria McCormick of Chevy Chase, Md., Robert of Washington and Philip of Flagstaff, Ariz.; seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company