Clearance

The case against John Carter Vincent, the State Department careerist who played a key role in the U.S.'s disastrous China policy, had two aspects: Was Vincent a Communist? Whether he was or wasn't, did he make serious misjudgments damaging to the U.S. national interest and helpful to the Red conquest of China?

Last week the State Department once again vouched for Vincent's loyalty, and ordered him back from Washington, where he had appeared before the Senate Internal Security inquiry, to his post as U.S. minister in Tangier. The clearance was a stiff reply to both Joe McCarthy and ex-Communist Louis Budenz who charged that Vincent operated as a Communist sympathizer while he ran State's Office of Far Eastern Affairs between 1945 and 1947. To make the point sharp, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave Vincent his personal assurance of "the department's full confidence . . . appreciation of your 27 years of conscientious service and best wishes for the future."

But State's clearance said nothing on the question of Vincent's misjudgments as the foreign service's No. 1 China expert. It is still State's position, as laid down in the white paper of 1949, that it made no mistakes, that nothing U.S. diplomats did, or might have done, could have saved China for the free world.

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