Unwarranted Ordeal

By Richard Bernstein

THE CHINA HANDS: AMERICA'S FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICERS AND WHAT BEFELL THEM

by EJ. KAHN JR. 337 pages. Viking. $12.95.

Americans are once again half in love with China. Senators now vie for invitations to Peking. Tourism to the People's Republic has gone from privilege to fad. Chinoiserie is the rage of the boutique. Indeed, in the situation ethics of detente, when President and Premier could chat like old comrades, it seems churlish to recall that the Communist takeover of China once precipitated something close to a national nervous breakdown.

A quarter-century ago, that political guerrilla Joseph McCarthy excoriated dozens of civil servants for losing China to the Reds. Chief among the Senator's victims were a group of brilliant young Foreign Service officers who had served in China during World War II. McCarthy, with the willing assistance of the pro-Nationalist China lobby and various freelance operatives, plus a manipulation of derogatory data, managed to ruin the officers' careers.

Vast Monolith. Today, of course, it is part of the conventional wisdom that it was Chiang Kai-shek and his coterie of corrupt politicians and generals who "lost" China. But in the '50s, distinctions were not so easy to draw. Most Americans admired Chiang as a hero--and in many respects he was. Convinced of Nationalist China's democratic policies, the public saw the Generalissimo as a leader in the Western tradition and was moved by memories of his fight against Imperial Japan. The foreign left seemed a vast, threatening monolith. Given this new climate of fear, the attack on the Foreign Service men seemed to many repugnant in practice but justified in intent. Senator McCarthy seized the moment to cow the federal employees who might have aided the accused. As E.J. Kahn puts it in The China Hands, his sensitive, knowing account of their ordeal, "Few had ever been so mightily damned by nasty people and so meagerly defended by nice ones." Nasty or nice, honest men could disagree about the China experts' judgment, but it was their loyalty that was frenetically attacked. They were railroaded out of the Foreign Service, or at best shunted off to obscure posts far from Asia. Their salient fault was to have reported on China as they saw it: America's ally, Chiang Kaishek, looked to them like a loser in 1944, and the Communists, with their grass-roots appeal, like winners. Later, during the early 1950s, the investigators willfully confused prediction with preference until it became plausible to say, as one of them did, that the Foreign Service officers "planned to slowly choke to death and destroy the government of the Republic of China and build up the Chinese Communists for postwar success."

Chief among the accused were John Stewart Service and John Paton Davies. Both had been the children of Protestant missionaries near the southwestern city of Chengtu. Both spoke impeccable Chinese. The dispatches they sent during the war are now regarded as models of probity and insight, cited at length in most histories of modern China.

In 1943 Davies led a ragged group of American G.I.s on a one-month march to safety in the enemy-infested jungles of Burma. Such was Davies' courage and resourcefulness that a war correspondent named Eric Sevareid, who took part in the trek, later testified: "I thought then, as I think now, that if ever again I were in deep trouble, the man I would want to be with would be this particular man."

Sudden Disgrace. Sevareid's encomium was occasioned by Davies' dismissal from the Foreign Service by the Secretary of State. John Foster Dulles had suddenly found his China expert weak of character and lacking in judgment, discretion and reliability. Others, including TIME, felt that Davies had been instrumental in undercutting General MacArthur on the eve of the Korean War. (Whether or not he was, "surely" adds Kahn, "there was never anyone quite so capable of undercutting MacArthur as MacArthur himself.") Davies' disgrace came three years after that of Service, who had been called innumerable times before various loyalty investigating committees Each time Service, who had been declared by U.S.

Ambassador Clarence Gauss "the out standing younger officer who served with me over my 36 years of service," was cleared of all wrongdoing. During the final investigation before the Government's Loyalty Review Board, "reasonable doubt as to his loyalty" was abruptly discovered. Hours after this in explicable finding, he was ousted from the Foreign Service by then Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

Cultural Collision. Kahn traces the scraps and shards of "evidence" that the McCarthyites would later use to prove malevolent pro-Communist conspiracies. The scholarly O. Edmund Clubb, for example, had served with distinction in numerous China posts from Hankow to Urumchi; in Peking in 1937 he had rushed between armed groups of Americans and Chinese to straighten out what was about to become a bloody misunderstanding. But once, trying to kill an afternoon in New York, he spent a few minutes in the offices of a leftist magazine called the New Masses. That was in 1932. Two decades later, with no further proof of his disloyalty, Clubb was bullied out of the Foreign Service after 24 years of distinguished service.

Some of these misadventures have been recounted before, principally in revisionist histories of the cold war. Even so, Kahn's absorbing anecdotal approach gives us more incident and illumination than we have had before.

Moreover, The China Hands, with its canny sense of place and time, serves as an informal precis of the broad cultural collision that usually goes by the name of Sino-American relations.

But what lingers in the mind is not so much history as dignity--the quality with which the victims faced their ordeal.

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