The ‘Breaking of an Honorable Career’

1.

In the 1950s, the late John King Fairbank, the dean of modern China studies at Harvard, used to tell us graduate students a joke about the allegation that a group of red-leaning foreign service officers and academics—the four Johns—had “lost” China: John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, and John King Fairbank himself. What the McCarthyites had forgotten, Fairbank said, was to finger the fifth “John”: John Kai-shek.¹

Fairbank was the “John” I knew best. When I heard the joke, the topic was still raw for Fairbank, who had had to testify before Senator Pat McCarran’s Subcommittee on Internal Security and before a Pentagon loyalty-security board (in the latter case to determine whether he was fit to be admitted to American-occupied Japan). He addressed a seminar about his experiences. He underlined the irony that while he was being queried about his relationship to the Chinese political scientist Qian Duansheng, Qian was being attacked in China for his relationship to Fairbank.

A problem for Fairbank was that he could not always recall what he said or when he said it, or whom he met when. He told us that it was vital to keep a record of such comings and goings; indeed, to prepare for his ordeal, he had felt obliged to compile a twenty-two-page booklet of Excerpts from Writings and Speeches, 1946–1950 containing all his key statements relating to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).² Edwin O. Reischauer—Fairbank’s collaborator in teaching Harvard’s legendary “Rice Paddies” course about East Asia³—disagreed, arguing that this would constrain scholars into an undesirable consistency. Of course, as a Japanologist (later Kennedy’s ambassador to Tokyo), Reischauer’s loyalty was not questioned; America had unquestionably “won” Japan.

Fairbank had a rough time, but it did not affect his academic tenure. The four foreign service “Johns” all lost their jobs. I only had brief acquaintance with each of them. I met John Paton Davies Jr. in the environs of a major China conference held in New York in March 1969, with Edwin Reischauer and Doak Barnett of Columbia presiding. The aim was to produce new policy initiatives, and Ted Kennedy, at that time still a viable presidential hopeful, gave a keynote speech.⁴ I was buttonholed by a radical younger scholar, Richard Pfeffer, and asked if I would appear on air, presumably representing the establishment, in a discussion (read confrontation) on China with John Paton Davies, presumably a stern critic of US policy, who would put me to flight. Davies and I sat down over a coffee to discuss how we would handle the subject.

I found Davies very charming and knowledgeable, but perhaps that was because we disagreed about relatively little. As Professor Bruce Cumings writes in a helpful epilogue to China Hand: An Autobiography, Davies’s memos for the State Department in 1949–1950 clearly placed him “on the conservative side of US foreign policy toward East Asia.” So this would not be the “studio bash” that Pfeffer had hoped for. Since Davies would be a far greater draw for an audience, I offered to withdraw. My memory is that Pfeffer decided to cut his losses and keep hold of the two birds in his hand.⁵

2.

Among the China hands who bore the brunt of McCarthyite attacks, only two were “mish” kids: Davies and Service, who grew up as boyhood friends in Sichuan province. John Paton Davies Sr. was a devout Baptist missionary. Robert Service was in charge of YMCA activities; apparently, the Davies parents regarded the YMCA people as a little “worldly,” though John Paton Jr., born 1908, grew up to be more worldly, or perhaps more conservative, than Jack Service, born 1909.

After home schooling and two years in the American High School in Shanghai, Davies spent a couple of years at the Experimental College of the University of Wisconsin, studying Athenian civilization the first year and nineteenth-century America the second. For their junior year, Davies and a friend went to China, working their way across the Pacific on the Dollar Line, jumping ship in Tokyo, and enrolling as students at the missionary-supported Yenching University in Beijing. Davies majored in journalism

in anticipation of a glamorous career as a foreign correspondent, traveling about the world (first class), darting in and out of wars, mingling easily with the high and the mighty, and reporting it all in crunchy cables to an appreciative public.

Much of his dream came true, though not through journalism. His freelance efforts at Yenching were unsuccessful and he abandoned the thought of a press career. Instead, after a senior year at Columbia, he successfully sat the foreign service entrance examination.

3.

Despite the shabby way in which the State Department later treated him, Davies, who died in 1999, looked back on the foreign service that he entered with high regard. It was an “elite corps,” because it had a “compelling sense of public duty,” a commitment that “reached back to a nineteenth-century assumption that with privileged status went an obligation to serve the commonweal.” He described Henry L. Stimson, the secretary of state at the time of his entry into the foreign service, as being of this character, “an upright, public-spirited gentleman.”

After an obligatory probationary year at the consulate in Windsor, Ontario, he had three months of tutoring in department duties in Washington, receiving very mixed reviews. From consul general C.E. Gauss, who taught “documentation of merchandise and shipping and seamen,” he was graded as having good appearance, courtesy, and pleasing manners, “but not particularly energetic, inquiring, attentive or accurate. Thirteenth in a class of fifteen officers.” Gauss’s lack of enthusiasm for Davies surfaced again ten years later when, as ambassador to China in the early 1940s, he had to put up with his freewheeling diplomatic style.

Davies’s first posting was as a vice-consul in Kunming in southwest China, but it did not last long. He applied successfully for the two-year course in Chinese studies that the legation in Beijing offered, believing that his career would be advanced as a China specialist.⁶ His replacement in Kunming was Jack Service. During his two years in Beijing—1933 to 1935—Davies met a number of Americans who would loom large in portraying China to the outside world: Edgar Snow, yet to make his famous trip to the Communist bastion in the northwest; John Fairbank, a graduate student researching Qing documents; and Harold Isaacs, the future author of The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. But Davies’s most significant encounter was with the US military attaché, Colonel Joseph W. Stilwell, and the man who would become his principal aide, Captain Frank “Pinky” Dorn, a fellow student in the legation course. Stilwell and Dorn later shaped his career.

After completing his course, Davies was posted to Mukden (now Shenyang) in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. There he learned from the consul general, Joseph W. Ballantine, that it was permissible to allow “reputable and discreet” journalists to see confidential documents.⁷ According to Davies, John Gunther’s section on Manchukuo in his Inside Asia was basically a rewrite of consular files. By 1938, after the Japanese invasion of China, Davies was posted in what turned out to be the temporary Nationalist Chinese capital of Hankou. Stilwell, Dorn, and Snow, by now the famous author of Red Star Over China, were there, along with other future notables of the China field. (China Hand reproduces a picture of a party at Davies’s apartment that included Agnes Smedley, Jack Belden, Evans Carlson, Freda Utley, and Zhang Hanfu.)⁸

4.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, Davies was working as a China desk officer back in Washington. Still in touch with Stilwell and Dorn, he asked that they take him along wherever they might be posted, which he doubtless assumed would be an exciting assignment since Stilwell was reckoned to be one of the best battlefield commanders in the US Army. Instead, Stilwell was assigned to China as chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, the supreme commander of the Chinese theater, and as commanding general of US forces in China-Burma-India (which hardly existed at the time), and promoted to lieutenant general.

Stilwell and Dorn asked for Davies and, much to his superiors’ chagrin, the State Department had to appoint him consul at Kunming, ranking as a second secretary at the Chongqing embassy, and detailing him to “the China Military Mission headed by Major General Joseph W. Stilwell,” as a “liaison between the Mission and American and foreign civil officials.” For the next two and a half years of Stilwell’s abortive mission to persuade Chiang to commit his troops to large-scale operations against the Japanese, Davies had an enviably “wide latitude of initiative and action.” Stilwell told him: “There’s nothing I can tell you about how to run your job. You’re a free agent.”

This freedom involved a fair amount of travel between the Indian and Chinese sectors of Stilwell’s command. On one occasion, flying over the “hump” to China, he had to parachute from a malfunctioning aircraft into the jungle and the arms of Naga headhunters. Fortunately they turned out to be friendly and hospitable. Davies emerged as the one who maintained the morale of the erstwhile passengers, and at the time of his dismissal from the State Department in 1954, Eric Sevareid of CBS, who had been his fellow passenger, commented on the air that there had been a move to decorate Davies for his outstanding personal conduct—it did not happen—and went on:

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. I have known a great number of men around the world, under all manner of circumstances. I have known none who seemed more the whole man; none more finished a civilized product, in all that a man should be—in modesty and thoughtfulness, in resourcefulness and steady strength of character.

Typically, that encomium does not appear in Davies’s autobiography.

5.

Davies liaised far and wide: the remnants of the British authorities from Burma did not occupy him long, but he had many meetings with Indian politicians, including Gandhi and Nehru. Davies had no time for British imperialism, arguing in a report to Stilwell that “the British raj is not and will not be exempt from the decay nor from the impact of new forces at large in the world.” But he had little time for Indian leaders either:

However decadent British rule in India may be, most of the Indian nationalist leaders are themselves more decadent and lacking in aggressive vitality…. The tremendous influence of Gandhi in defining the expression of the Indian revolutionary urge has been a retrogressive one.

Perhaps he was right, or perhaps he had become so inured to the continual warfare among Chinese that he had only a limited conception of how a non-violent political movement like satyagraha might be successful.

In fact, Davies had little respect for politicians in general. When Stilwell summoned him to Chongqing to help handle the visiting Republican candidate for president, Wendell Willkie, Davies commented that he was “like so many seeking to thrust their services on the citizenry through elective office, enamored of self, assuming that his unbuttoned personality exuded persuasive allure.”⁹ When Stilwell disputed the claim by Chiang’s favorite, General Claire Chennault, that air power could win the war in China, FDR apparently favored Chennault, and Davies comments that the president had a “facile predilection for the charlatan solution.” When Stilwell was recalled from China at the urging of Chiang and of the president’s personal representative Patrick J. Hurley, “I felt that Roosevelt had pusillanimously let Stilwell down.”

Davies saw that Stilwell “was rightly called Vinegar Joe. He was often an abusive vulgarian in his speech and writing.” But when Stilwell’s mission was terminated, “I was overly disturbed by Stilwell’s recall, also influenced by affection for the General. I looked on his removal as a near tragedy for the American effort in China.” But despite his admiration for Stilwell, Davies’s firsthand account of the political infighting in Chongqing and Washington reveals that he knew early on that the general’s mission was hopeless. American wheedling and occasional threats to withold arms and supplies were insufficient to persuade a nationalist like Chiang with a strong survival instinct to allow an American general to take over command of his troops to whip them into shape. Nor would he allow his own generals to lead them into major engagements: his forces had to be preserved for the final struggle with the Communists that he correctly anticipated would follow the end of the Japanese war.

Stilwell did Davies one last favor before departing China, authorizing him to visit the Communist headquarters in Yan’an. Earlier Davies had drafted a memorandum for Roosevelt asking Chiang to allow an American observer group to be sent to Yan’an, a request the Generalissimo finally agreed to. The group, which included Jack Service, arrived in Yan’an in July 1944 and Davies flew there in October. He met Mao, Zhou Enlai, and many Communist generals. Looking back over the memoranda he wrote on the basis of his visit, he admits that he underestimated both the commitment of the CCP to ideology and the dexterity with which Mao manipulated it. But he correctly predicted that the Communists would win: “The Communists are in China to stay. And China’s destiny is not Chiang’s but theirs.”¹⁰ Nevertheless, in a memorandum to Stilwell’s successor General Albert Wedemeyer, he wrote: “We should not now abandon Chiang Kai-shek.” However, “we must not indefinitely underwrite a politically bankrupt regime.”¹¹ This implicitly contradictory advice underlined how difficult it was to be both conservative and realistic in China at that time.

6.

By the end of 1944, it was clear to Davies that his position in Chonqing was untenable because Hurley (now ambassador) had been turned against him by Chiang’s brother-in-law, Foreign Minister T.V. Soong. Due to his close assocation with Stilwell, he had inherited his enemies. Davies got a transfer to Moscow where he worked happily for two years, particularly on Sino-Soviet relations, first under Averell Harriman and George Kennan and then under General Walter Bedell Smith, returning to the US and to the Policy Planning Staff, headed by Kennan, in June 1947. In China the civil war had begun, and when Chiang Kai-shek and his beaten armies fled to Taiwan in 1949, the stage was set for the battle over who “lost” China. As Davies puts it: “The accusations were, in effect, that what we independently reported and predicted was what we willed and plotted to bring about.” The attack on Davies, along with Stilwell, was mounted first by the columnist Joseph Alsop in a series of three articles for The Saturday Evening Post entitled “Why We Lost China,” though by his third article Alsop seemed to have had regrets and started defending him.

Others were less discriminating: a journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer described Davies as “Stilwell’s pro-Red advisor” and a “tool of the Chinese Commies”; Freda Utley in her The China Story articulated a theory that there had been a pro-Communist conspiracy in the State Department and alleged that the “Davies-Service clique” had almost complete control over military and civilian reporting from China.

Davies writes about this period factually and, when we consider the impact it had on the life of him and his family, relatively briefly. Cumings’s epilogue fills in some of the gaps. As a result of the red scare of the McCarthy period, from 1949 to 1954 Davies went through nine examinations before a specially selected Loyalty Security Board. The first eight found no evidence of disloyalty and so the ninth was tasked with examining his “judgment, discretion and reliability” and found against Davies, though he was not informed of this conclusion. By this time he was deputy chief of mission in Peru, and when he was summoned back to Washington he did not know whether it was to be given an embassy or to be sacked. What he did know was that a year earlier, McCarthy had declared that in Davies’s case the Eisenhower administration had “struck out,” its “batting average is zero,” a slur to which there was no rebuttal either from the White House or Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, “who, for a man of prominent principles,” as Davies acidly remarks, “was less than dauntless in his relations with the political vigilantes.”

On November 5, 1954, Davies was received by Dulles and his legal adviser Herman Phleger. After expressing some esteem for his parents-in-law—Henry F. Grady had been ambassador to India (America’s first), Greece, and Iran—Dulles announced the result of the ninth board and said he had no option but to “separate” him from the service. Dulles confirmed in response to Davies’s question that it was to do with his activities in China.

Davies said goodbye and went straight to the department’s press room where he handed out a statement he had prepared with his wife in Lima. It stated without rancor that there had been enough recrimination. “I am not prepared to add to it and thereby detract from the strength of my country and its mortal struggle with the Communist enemy. So I shall not contest the Secretary’s decision or seek to compare my record with those of others. I must be content to let history be my judge.”

But in the end, he wasn’t. This autobiography reveals, through many excerpts from the incisive and perceptive memos that he wrote over his years in China and thereafter, how terribly he had been traduced. He wrote hesitantly: we are told in Todd Purdum’s foreword that he started this book in 1972, wrote for twenty years, but left it unfinished at his death. Some of the story emerged in his earlier book, Dragon by the Tail, interspersed with an account of the Chinese revolution, but without the memos.¹²

Essentially, he wrote this book for anyone interested in America’s World War II encounter with China and the devastating domestic witch hunt it unleashed, and how one very intelligent and heroic public servant experienced it all. The political crowds out the personal, and we learn little about his devoted wife and what was clearly a very happy marriage. Nor does he tell us how they lived the forty-five years after his dismissal. Cumings fills us in.

From Washington, Davies returned to Lima, spent a year researching various employment possibilities, and in the end set up a furniture factory, learning the trade from scratch, crafting exotic woods found in the Amazon, winning international design awards. In the end, union problems undermined the company, and in 1964 the Davies moved back to the US so that their seven children could experience their own culture. Later, strapped for cash, the family lived in Malaga, Paris, and rural England, before returning to America for the last twenty years of his life.

In 1969, at the age of sixty, as a result of ingenious moves made earlier by sympathizers in the Johnson administration, Davies had his security clearance restored and received a minimal pension, though not from the State Department. Writing in The New York Times, Davies’s former chief George Kennan commented:

This belated correction [of a “shocking and inexcusable injustice”] will not restore to the public life of the country the decade and a half of the services of a talented, dedicated and wholly patriotic Foreign Service officer that were forfeited as a consquence of it. But if it will help to engender in American public opinion a more incisive revulsion at the spectacle of political figures playing fast and loose with the reputations of others for political gain, and if the memory of it will inspire the Department of State to a somewhat greater sense of loyalty toward its own personnel, then perhaps the anguish caused not just to an innocent man but to family and friends as well by this breaking of an honorable career will have served some useful purpose.¹³

To which the only comment can be: Amen.