John S. Service Oral History Interview, Chap IX-XI

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview donated to the Harry S. Truman Library. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word, although some editing was done.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and John S. Service, dated March 7, 1980.

No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with John S. Service requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to grant or deny permission.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

John S. Service, "State Department Duty in China, The McCarthy Era, and After, 1933-1977," an oral history conducted 1977-1978 by Rosemary Levenson, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1981.

Opened March, 1980
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[299]

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER IX PRELUDE: THE AMERASIA CASE
[Interview 9: October 10, 1977]

Washington, Home Leave, and a Surprise Reassignment to Chungking

J. SERVICE: In 1942, I was the first political officer back from China after Pearl Harbor. This time, in '44, I was the first person back to Washington who'd been in Yenan. So it was the same thing, only double in spades.

I was in much more demand for these debriefing sessions. I had, of course, far more to say. I'd observed far more. It was a frantic business of running around and talking to Currie and more talks with people like [Drew] Pearson, other newspaper people, a lot of them sent to me by the Department. IPR [Institute of Pacific Relations] session again, a much larger one, a crowded one of course.

I was called to Hopkins' office, had about forty minutes with Hopkins, in a little tiny office in the White House, barely enough room on the floor for me to stretch out this map (Showing the extent of Communist controlled areas of China. See Appendix I for a chronology of events, April 1941-March 1950). He said, as I cite in the [Amerasia] monograph, at the end that, "Well, very interesting, and probably what you say is mostly true," or "Most of what you say is true." "But, after all, they call themselves Communists. Besides, the only Chinese that Americans know is Chiang Kai-shek." That was the end of the conversation.

I tried feebly to do as I had done with Hamilton on an earlier talk, to say something about taking a positive role, informing the public, and so on. I said that when word gets out what the Communists are really like, the attitude toward them is going to change. But, Hopkins wasn't really very much interested. Very close to H.H. Kung apparently --

[300]

LEVENSON: How did you feel about our China policy at this point?

J. SERVICE: I was discouraged, but it seemed so completely absurd that I don't think I really took it in. You know, "This can't be," was my reaction.

He asked me about Hurley as ambassador, and I said it would be a disaster. He said, "Why?" I said, "He's in the Kuomintang pocket, working against Stilwell." But Hurley was appointed.

I saw Stilwell over at the Pentagon. He was sitting in the next office to "Hap" Arnold, five stars. Joe was four stars.

I gave him my October 10 memo which I'd never had a chance to get to him before (Esherick, op. cit. pp. 161-166). He said something about hoping that my having worked for him wasn't going to have any harmful effects on me. There weren't any consultations about China policy. All those hopes were finished.

The Department's plan was to send me to Moscow. Somebody had decided that it would be a good idea to have someone in Moscow that knew something about China. I was to be the first "China" man sent there. Davies was going to stay in China. Wedemeyer liked Davies and they were getting along fine.

I came back out here [California] for Christmas, and just before New Year's, there was a phone call from John Carter [Vincent]. "Davies has gotten in a row with Hurley. We've got to get him out. Will you go back? Do you want to go back?" I said, "Sure."

LEVENSON: Were you glad to?

J. SERVICE: Oh, of course. Sure, what the hell. After all, there was a war on; we all wanted to do something. It's hard nowadays to remember how patriotic we felt--but perhaps there was also some personal interest.

I asked about Wedemeyer's attitude. He said, "Wedemeyer has asked for you. Wedemeyer wants you. We're going to ask that you be allowed to continue contact with the Communists. This is our main reason in agreeing to your going back."

It was a matter of great haste. I took off New Year's Eve, as I recall, or very near New Year's Eve, went back to Washington. In those days it was a long hop across the country.

[301]

J. SERVICE: When I got to the Department, the chief of personnel, chief of Foreign Service personnel, wanted to talk to me. [tape off] The chief of Foreign Service personnel asked me to see him. Briefly, he said that he had very serious doubts about sending me back to Chungking, that he'd been told that it would very likely--[tape off]-- have bad effects on the family. In other words, he knew about the family situation. I said to him that he didn't need to worry, that we had reached a resolution on that, which would solve that problem. I was not going to go ahead with the divorce, was going to stay with the family, and so that he didn't need to feel the Department was in effect breaking up a marriage.

I said the real problem in Chungking, as far as I could see it, was Hurley, his attitude toward the Foreign Service, and particularly the circumstances that forced John Davies' recall in a hurry.

He said he understood that and knew about it, that I would be working, of course, not under Hurley but under the army, and that the State Department understood the situation and would be in effect behind me. I forget if that's exactly the words he used.

So, off to China I went. Got a telegram I think in New Delhi from my brother Dick and from Dave Barrett. I think they said, "Don't go to Chungking, but if you feel you've got to, stop in Kunming."

I stayed in New Delhi with the man who was head of the American diplomatic mission -- we didn't have an embassy; it was called an American commission or something like that -- a man named George Merrell who'd been in Peking years before. There I met General Donovan who was head of the OSS , who was flying to Chungking, had his own plane. He was going to Chungking, so he said, "Fly with me," which I naturally did not turn down.

In Kunming my brother and Dave Barrett said, "You're committing suicide. Don't go. Hurley will have your scalp." "Well," I said, "one can't refuse. You can't not go after having accepted the assignment."

So I went. We got off the plane in Chungking. Tai Li had turned out to meet Donovan. [chuckling] The look on Tai Li's face, when I walked out of the plane beside Donovan, helped to make the whole occasion a little more happy.

Well, I think that's probably a pretty good place to quit.

[302]

Hurley and Wedemeyer Replace Gauss and Stilwell

LEVENSON: There's a new American cast now.

J. SERVICE: Yes. The [CBI] theater had been broken. Wedemeyer had taken over the China theater from Stilwell. Gauss had left and Hurley was now ambassador.

LEVENSON: How much did this represent a relegation of China to a second class position in terms of American priorities?

J. SERVICE: Partly you've got to remember that Hurley was sent out to do a specific job. He was sent out to negotiate the placing of Stillwell in command of Chinese troops. I don't think that anybody in Washington expected it to be more than that.

But then that ended in a fiasco. Gauss resigned in anger and disgust, and Hurley was on the spot. The Chinese wrote a letter to Roosevelt--it's in my monograph--asking that Hurley be nominated. This would occur to me to be a very poor reason for making a man ambassador!

I can only assume that in Washington they thought, "What the hell. China is a headache and is not very important." (I think by that time it was regarded as not very important.) "He seems to get along with Chiang, and we've had nothing except trouble and friction with Chiang. So, why not name him?" But, I really don t know.

I was in Chungking from January 18 and I left in early April [1945], so I was only in China for a relatively short while. It's a confused and ineffectual period in a way.

Hurley wanted to talk to me, as soon as I arrived, and this was when he gave me the warning that if I interfered with him, he would break me. I said I had no intention of interfering with him. After all, any military or other commander needed intelligence, information, and I felt that was my job. Also I was working for the army, which was something he never really accepted. He felt that he was coordinating all American activity in China including the army.

Wedemeyer agreed that I was to work for him and said not to pay too much attention to Hurley's blusterings. But, his idea of what he wanted me to do was quite different from what it had been under Stilwell. [tape off]

[303]

LEVENSON: Did you feel threatened by Hurley, genuinely threatened?

J. SERVICE: Oh, certainly it was a very threatening atmosphere. The whole atmosphere in Chungking was threatening. The embassy staff was operating under very difficult conditions. Hurley had his own little separate embassy really in a sense. He was communicating not with the State Department but with the White House, ignoring the State Department, using the "Mary" Miles navy group communications, not even the embassy or State Department radios. Also, he was threatening the staff and preventing their reporting anything that was unfavorable.

But Wedemeyer wanted, I think, a political agent much as John Davies had functioned in India. He had known John in India and Southeast Asia Command headquarters where Wedemeyer had been deputy with Mountbatten.

I was breaking up with my Chinese friend Yun-ju. That had to be gone through. Then, Sol Adler was away. He was back in Washington I think at that time. So--and perhaps it was fortunate in a way--I wasn't able to move back into his old quarters.

I stayed for a while, as I recall, in army billets, and then moved in--there was an extra bed at the embassy mess--with the counselor and the secretaries. I moved in with them.

Political Adviser to Wedemeyer: Meeting with Chou En-lai

J. SERVICE: I did a sort of a diplomatic job for Wedemeyer. Some Free French representatives were in China and they wanted American help for getting into Indochina. Our official policy then was we weren't going to help the French get back Indochina, since that was Roosevelt's policy. We had to tell them we were very sorry but we couldn't give them any assistance at that time. Later on they got some I think.

Wedemeyer's staff were all new people practically. Everybody that was associated with Stilwell was given the heave-ho. A new crew came in with no China background.

The whole tone of the headquarters had changed, "Well, Stilwell tactics didn't work, and we're just here to get along with the Chinese." So there really wasn't much desire for
political intelligence.

[304]

LEVENSON: You've raised an interesting question. You said, "Stilwell's staff was given the heave-ho, but you, who got labelled as the primary culprit--Wedemeyer asked for you to come back. Have you any explanation for that?

J. SERVICE: [chuckling] Yes. Wedemeyer was going through a process here. He didn't really make up his mind all at one time. I think that the heave-ho was particularly on the military people, because Stilwell did have a lot of old classmates from West Point and people he'd known in the army. Some of them were good and some of them were not terribly good. They were rather obsolescent types, and that's one reason they were in the CBI theater, after all. This was not where the main action was. Wedemeyer wanted to bring in his younger people.

But Wedemeyer did have an idea of needing advisers. He was very much of a staff man. Eisenhower had his political advisers, and there had been some down in the Southeast Asia Command. This was an accepted thing. I think Wedemeyer wanted to have experienced people. He wanted it at first. Later on he very much went with the tide. As he saw things develop and as Hurley became powerful and Hurley's views were accepted, why, then of course he turned against us.

But, as we'll see later on, in this early period Wedemeyer was still at least toying with the idea of working with the Communists and working out some compromise. Everyone thought--even Hurley--that if you just bore down, the Communists would cave in, and that then we would be able to work with the Communists.

At any rate, Wedemeyer did recognize that I was sent back to China with the understanding of the State Department that I would maintain contact with the Communists. He said, "Be patient. We can do this later on, but we can't do it right now."

Hurley was in a very inflamed state of mind. There was a big incident, a row, with Wedemeyer's chief of staff, General McClure, over an OSS mission that had gone up to Yenan with some proposal for cooperation. The OSS had a lot of people who were available in Europe and had been working with the Maquis and the Resistance in Europe, behind the lines. The idea was that OSS would bring them out to China and do the same thing up in north China with the Communists.

LEVENSON: Where they would blend beautifully, of course, with their Caucasian faces! [laughter]

[305]

J. SERVICE: Well anyway, in wars we do funny things.

This business of lying low and not interfering with Hurley proved to be very difficult. Chou En-lai was in town for negotiations which had died out, petered out. He looked me up and, of course, the Communists were desperately trying to find out just what was American policy.

LEVENSON: Chou En-lai looked you up. Did he send a message? How did he get in touch with you?

J. SERVICE: I'm not quite sure right now just how he did it. I imagine he probably did it through his assistant Ch'en khia-k'ang or through one of his staff people who may have either telephoned me or come around. As I recall, Chou came to see me, but maybe I'm wrong on that. But, I have a recollection that Chou came to see me. I didn't look him up. I was at this time trying to be fairly cautious.

LEVENSON: What had alerted you?

J. SERVICE: Hurley himself, what he was doing to his staff. I've got a lot of correspondence we can put in later if you want, an affidavit by Ringwalt, for instance, of an episode where Ringwalt had submitted a report about some of the Lend-Lease arms being used by the Kuomintang against the Communists. Hurley has T.V. Soong in his office and calls Ringwalt in and shows the report to T.V., who says, "There's no truth in this." So, then Hurley upbraids Ringwalt on the spot.

LEVENSON: In front of T.V. Soong?

J. SERVICE: In front of T.V. Soong. This sort of thing.

Hurley was very fond of having meetings with representatives of all the American agencies, and having each person stand up and give a report of what he was doing. He had me stand up in front of the crowd and say that my job was purely political reporting.

I had to report the Chou En-lai visit. Chou En-lai was very discouraged about the negotiations and said that they were as good as dead. I reported by letter. I don't think I wrote an official report on it.

LEVENSON: By letter to whom?

J. SERVICE: To Vincent who was the head of FE [Far East desk] at this time.

[306]

J. SERVICE: Sometime early in February, Ludden came back, Ray Ludden, a Foreign Service officer who had gone up with the Dixie Mission. He'd been on a long trip to the guerrilla areas, way out to the area fairly close to Peking. He traveled over a thousand miles through the guerrilla areas.

He was a fresh mind. He hadn't been intimidated. He wanted to talk to Wedemeyer. He and I went to see Wedemeyer. We had an outline. He told Wedemeyer what great potential there was for cooperation with the Communists.

Wedemeyer was very interested and said, "Well now, I'm going to Washington very soon with Hurley, and we'll undoubtedly talk about these things." He wanted us to write out more fully what we'd discussed, which we did in a memo on February 17. It's in the book by Esherick (Esherick, op. cit., February 28, 1945, pp. 358-363) and in U.S. Foreign Relations. Then he gave orders for Ludden to go to Washington to be there at the same time. But Ludden was never called in Washington.

"The Situation in China": A Joint Despatch from the Embassy's Political Officers, February 28, 1945

J. SERVICE: Hurley and Wedemeyer left. Soon after [George] Atcheson, who was charge d'affaires, said to some of us that he thought we should give a report on the situation since the Department hadn't received any full reporting for some time, and give them our estimation of the situation.

Atcheson was a very traditional diplomat. One didn't expect him to suggest anything as bold and daring as this. We agreed with some pleasure and as we talked, it was suggested that I do the first draft, because I had been writing a good deal along this line.

I wrote the original draft. We talked it over among us and there were a few changes made. I think Ringwalt was there, Freeman was there, a man named Yuni. There were four or five officers in the political section.

Then we gave it to George, and he made only one substantive change. That was to add the phrase: "The presence of General Wedemeyer in Washington as well as General Hurley should be a favorable opportunity for discussion of this matter," which was a very good bureaucratic change to make.

[306a]

Feb. 19 (1945) 373

Dear John: [Davies]

Well we finally overcame the nausea that overwhelmed us and ended up by getting in with both feet. Al (General Albert C. Wedemeyer) says he agrees heartily with our general view of things, that he is going to try and do something about--within the limits of action of a soldier--and that he wants both of us to stay with him. Things are looking up--but only very moderately so far.

Al did not want me to send you this stuff direct. He suggested routing through the Dept. I have asked to do it, through Chip. Let me know how it works.

We have a jeep. An office (but a lousy one, except for convenience) right next to the new HQ. And the General says he's going to get us a house. And the Political Advisor is being given a few odd jobs and asked a few questions. Also they have been promised a stenographer clerk. But fingers still crossed on that one.

The biggest problem is whether the small whisker (Brigadier General Patrick Hurley) (also known as “paper tiger"), "Major Blimp" and various other less complimentary names) is to come back. What can you do? I don't need to tell you anymore. Except that things are worse than when you were here. Much worse. And everybody now thinks we Americans are crazy. And George the A (George Atcheson) is in tears, most of the time.

Be sure to continue to lend me your guidance and advice as/in the past.

God I wish you were going to be in Wash. the next few weeks.

Love to Pat.

(Signed ) Jack.

[307]

J. SERVICE: I think I was the one, but I m not sure, who suggested that it might be helpful in giving the message more impact--and also a good thing to show solidarity with Atcheson--if we all signed the message. Normally a message is signed only by the head of the office. So, we put this phrase at the end, "This telegram has been drafted with the assistance and agreement of all the political officers of the staff of this embassy and has been shown to General Wedemeyer's Chief of Staff, General Gross."

This went off, and when it got to Washington there was a big explosion when Hurley saw it, although as I pointed out in my monograph The Amerasia Papers the State Department agreed wholeheartedly with it, sent it to the White House, and so on.

This was fairly well discussed around American circles in Chungking. The fact that we were sending it was discussed. We took it over to the army, and the chief of staff, Gross, who was acting in the absence of Wedemeyer, agreed to it wholeheartedly.

LEVENSON: When you say discussed around town you mean--

J. SERVICE: I'm talking about American newspapermen. Newspapermen we trusted knew about it.

LEVENSON: So, you would assume that the Kuomintang also knew about it?

J. SERVICE: No, I doubt if they did because the press people we talked to were perfectly secure.

This was the end of February. I tried to settle down but without much success really. There wasn't quite the interest in the teashop gossip type of reporting that I had done so much of before.

Return Trip to Yenan

J. SERVICE: In March I got word, and I'm not sure just how the word came to me-- Chou En-lai had returned to Yenan--word came to me through the Communists that it would be a good time to be in Yenan. What I understood from this was that the party congress was about to be held. We had discussed many times the party congress and my hopes of being there.

I talked about it with Atcheson and also with the army. Since contact with the Communists had been the principal reason for my going back to China, everyone agreed I should go to Yenan. I got official orders and went and started reporting again from Yenan.

[308]

J. SERVICE: The spirit had changed in Yenan. The Chinese Communists weren't sure just what American policy was. They felt rebuffed. They were angry at Hurley because he had come up there in November and worked out with them their five points and agreed enthusiastically and signed them. Then as soon as he got back to Chungking and found out that Chiang Kai-shek didn't like them, he had gone back on his word and had become in effect a spokesman for the Kuomintang.

Relations had changed as far as cooperation went. They had more or less given up hope there was ever going to be any cooperation with us.

Morale in the [American] group had gone down. The man that was temporarily in charge was very suspicious of me and rather annoyed at my being there. But I made it clear to him that I had army orders and I wasn't reporting through him. I was reporting direct. We don't need to talk much about the reporting. It's all been covered.

"Mao Tse-tung Proposes to Come to Washington."?

LEVENSON: Were you aware that, as Barbara Tuchman and others have reported, Mao was prepared to go to Washington if an invitation could be secured?

J. SERVICE: This is all a mystery to me because I don't recall that they ever mentioned it. I still remain unconvinced about the whole thing--

LEVENSON: Really?

J. SERVICE: --because the message was supposedly sent by this relatively junior officer who was in charge temporarily--either a major or lieutenant colonel. I just don't know, whether he misunderstood something, whether he got it second hand, or what.

Mao or Chou never said a word to me. They never said a word to John Emmerson who was there at the same time. I just think it's all still rather a mystery. Either that or they were embarrassed about it and realized they'd made a mistake. I don't know.

LEVENSON: A mistake in what sense?

[309]

J. SERVICE: A tactical mistake in sending a message to Wedemeyer and asking that it be kept secret from Hurley. They requested that this not be made known to Hurley whom they didn't trust at all.

LEVENSON: They, meaning the Communist leaders?

J. SERVICE: The Communists, yes. That s not a very smart way of going about things, to deal through a junior officer they don't know very well and don't have very much confidence in. Send it through army channels. If they had really meant it seriously I would expect that Chou would have gone to Chungking and would have tried to talk directly to Wedemeyer.

It just is uncharacteristic of a very astute and adroit diplomat, which Chou En-lai was even at this time, to do it in this way, through this officer. So that I am not convinced even though the messages exist from this officer to [army] headquarters. They exist as messages drafted by an American, but I've never heard anything from the Chinese about it.

This was one of the things that I would have liked to have probed when I was in China in '71, but Chou didn't want to talk about the past. He wanted to talk about the present. "No use talking about what's finished." He shut me off when I tried to open it up. So I'm still unconvinced.

LEVENSON: That's interesting. A modern creation of a myth?

J. SERVICE: Well, there is a piece of paper there. But it's very surprising that, since I was in contact with these people during this period, I never heard of it.

The Communist Plan to Take Over Manchuria: Service's Despatch Lost

J. SERVICE: The Chinese were extremely friendly to me and talked very frankly. The congress was still delayed. It didn't actually take place until fairly late April. I'm not quite sure why they kept waiting, mostly, I think, to see what was going to happen in relations with Chungking, what the Generalissimo was going to do about calling a constitutional convention.

People like my old friend Chen Yi, the commander of the Fourth Army, were extremely frank and told me in great detail about their plans for moving into Manchuria, how they were already

[310]

J. SERVICE: preparing, getting their cadres ready, getting poised and already moving in, infiltrating people into Manchuria for the attempt to seize it before the Kuomintang could get there.

At any rate, we got these urgent, urgent, urgent orders for me to return to Chungking immediately and go to Washington soonest--

When I went through Chungking--I was only in Chungking for one day--headquarters asked me if there was anything I wanted to dictate, anything that I had in my mind I hadn't been able to write when I was in Yenan.

I said yes, there was one thing I thought was pertinent, and I sat down and dictated to the chief of staff's secretary, additional information on the Communists' plans for going into Manchuria. I had already written some, but I had more details to write.

Somehow, this has disappeared. We've never been able to find whatever happened to that. It would have been very helpful, in loyalty board and other hearings, to have had it, but it disappeared without a trace, at least as far as the army is concerned .

Service Recalled to Washington, April, 1945

LEVENSON: What were you wanted for back in Washington?

J. SERVICE: Hurley had found out in Washington that I was in Yenan, and that apparently enraged him. He stormed over to the State Department, demanded I be recalled. The State Department said, "He's not working for us. He's working for the army." Then he went to Stimson. The orders were issued and signed "Marshall," given highest priority. I was ordered home on army orders, and then released.

This was the beginning of controversy and disagreement in Washington, you might say. In 1944 when I'd come home, everyone was interested in what I had to say and there was pretty general agreement. But this time people were already beginning to divide a little bit.

Some people in the State Department--Drumright, for instance--were arguing that there was a civil war in China, the Communists are in rebellion, we can't have any dealings with them. There

[311]

J. SERVICE: were people in the Far Eastern section, particularly the old Japan contingent, Grew, Dooman, and other people, who represented the anti-Communist point of view.

The European people were anti-Communist, bitterly anti-Communist. They couldn't believe that there was any difference between Chinese Communists and Russian Communists. So, you began then at this period to have a sort of splitting in the Department.

As soon as I got in Washington I went to the State Department and was sitting in John Carter Vincent's office just after I arrived, when his telephone rang. He picked it up and said, "My God." Roosevelt had just died.

Assigned to Committee to Draft New Foreign Service Legislation

J. SERVICE: My original assignment--I was told--was that I was going to have a liaison job between the State Department and the Pentagon, more or less on handling information, intelligence reports and so on, making sure that each side was informed by the other.

After a couple weeks, before this job started, they said they had changed their mind and I was put on a task force that was preparing to write new Foreign Service legislation.

The Foreign Service was administered under a 1924 act, the Rogers Act, which had set up the modern Foreign Service, taken it out of the spoils and political field, and made it a career service. This was out of date, and it was felt that the Foreign Service needed to be modernized .

So, there was a task force set up, and I was one of the six or seven people, mostly young and reputedly with ideas, put on this group to study various proposals, and produce draft legislation.

In May, rather surprisingly, I got a double promotion. Promotions had been held up during the war, and so to rectify it, some people were given double promotions, which was rather unusual. That came through in May, I think May 18 or 19, the double promotion from grade six to four.

[312]

Feels Exploited by Jaffa, Roth, and Gayn

J. SERVICE: It had no connection in my mind, but before this change was made I met [Andrew] Roth, and then Roth introduced me to [Philip] Jaffe. [Mark] Gayn had also come into the act.

LEVENSON: These were people, just to put them in context, who were--

J. SERVICE: Gayn was a free lance writer who had done writing for Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, magazines like that. He had published articles which were obviously based partly on my reports. One of them was practically a steal of my June 20 [1944] report. He was getting, as many people were, background information, being allowed to read reports and so on.

Roth was a young chap working for the navy, and he had come to the I[nstitute of] P[acific] R[elations] session I had in the fall of '44, talked to me then. Gayn had written me letters, hoping to meet me when I got to Washington. They were all indicted in the Amerasia case. Gayn had written me letters before.

But all this is gone into in so much detail in all my hearings that I think we don't want to waste time going through it all here. Anybody that's going to be this much interested, I think, is probably also going to have read the transcripts of the Loyalty Board hearings where it's gone into ad nauseam and the Tydings committee.

I began to feel that I was really being exploited by this group of people.

I went to New York and talked to the Foreign Policy Council. [T.A.] Bisson was one of their research people, and he had invited me for the weekend.

I said, "Sure." I was glad to meet Bisson. He'd been in China. He'd stayed in my house in '37 when I was alone in Peking. He'd been in Manchuria and then stayed with me for a while. He lived out on Long Island.

Then it turned out that Jaffe was also invited. He called up and was going to give me a ride out there.

I didn't have any feeling that I was under any cloud or threat or anything. What I had done with letting Jaffe see some of these reports I'd written in China was not different from letting many other people see them. They'd been circulated fairly widely and many people had read them, for instance, in John Davies' office in New Delhi.

[313]

J. SERVICE: On June 6, Vincent asked me to write a memo about something that was happening in the international Communist field. The French Communists had just had a very blunt calling down by Stalin. It was a signal that they were going to have to stop wartime united front line and start a more independent line. Vincent asked me whether I thought this was going to apply to China. I wrote a memo and said that I didn't think it was going to. The Chinese were going to follow their own line.

I walked up to Vincent's office to give it to him, and I noticed some people hanging around the hall outside. I asked them if I could help them. "Oh no," they said. "We're just waiting for somebody."

Then later on I walked out of the building and walked down the sidewalk--lunch time this was--and saw them coming out of another door very hurriedly. It seemed very odd to run into these guys twice.

I was staying in the apartment of a girl in the Far Eastern division that was on leave. She knew I was alone in Washington--Caroline was still in California--so she said, "Well, just use my apartment while I'm away." She was away for a week or something. After leaving the office, I went to her apartment.

"We're FBI. You're Under Arrest"

J. SERVICE: About six thirty, the doorbell of the apartment rang. I opened the door, and here were the two guys that I'd seen in the State Department. They said, "We're FBI. You're under arrest," and so on.

They came in and I was naturally a bit stunned. They asked if they could search the place, and not being smart or experienced, I said yes. They said, "Where are the papers? Where are the papers?" [staccato] Well, they didn't find any papers. They thought I had the place stacked full of my reports.

I said, "My reports are all in my desk at the State Department."

Anyway, they searched the place, and they found a sort of private code that Davies and we "advisers" used writing among ourselves. Our letters had to go over Japanese territory in Burma. There was always a possibility of the plane being shot down, so we had an agreed on private code of using fictitious names .

[313a]

200 19th St. SE.
Washington, B.C.
June 7, 1945

Dear Mother:

You will have heard long since, I fear, that this address really means the Washington jail. It is a strange place to be writing from.

Reports written by me have been found in the possession of Mark Gayn and Phil Jaffe. They had some of them before they even knew me but the fact that they now do know me implicates me. I am innocent of the charges and am confident that I will be cleared. But a trial seems necessary. And that will take time.

I am interested in the instigating force or forces behind this.

Do not worry about me. I am having the help of Judge Helmick in getting a good lawyer. And believe it or not, after the first shock of the idea, I find myself quite comfortable. I would judge that as such establishments go, this is one of the best.

I am sure the Service escutcheon will remain untarnished. So keep your head up if the story gets in your newspapers and tell the neighbors you don't need their commiserations if they offer them.

The State Department is working to get Dick home ahead of the arrival of his replacement. So he should be with you before too long.

Very much love and admiration knowing that you will take this crisis as you have taken all others.

Jack

Transcript of letter on lined paper

[314]

J. SERVICE: Stilwell wasn't Stilwell. I forget -- Just code names, this sort of thing. Sort of silly. This was how Dixie got started. We referred to Yenan as Dixie, and so it was the Dixie Mission.

I was taken to the FBI offices and we had a long talk. I said, "This is crazy." I was perfectly willing to cooperate. We had a long, long, long session. They kept referring to little notebooks. They obviously knew all of my movements. They kept jogging my memory. "Did you see so and so? When was it?"

Finally I said, [chuckling] "You've got the dates here. I can't remember."

I don't know how long it took, but they wrote out a statement which I finally signed. Later on, of course, my lawyer was very sorry about that. I don't think we need to go into it. We'll include this in the record, can't we?

LEVENSON: Oh yes, we can.

This is a terrible question to ask, but how did you feel while this was going on?

J. SERVICE: Actually, I felt more terrible after I got in the jail than I did here. At this point I was just sort of flabbergasted and stunned, angry, but mostly just stunned I think.

Although these people were very clumsy in their tailing tactics--all this business of hanging around outside my office door in the State Department, chasing out another door of the State Department when I was out going to lunch, and this sort of thing--they obviously had instruction on how to interrogate. They were not giving anything away. They didn't ever tell you anything. I kept trying to find out what it was all about. They kept saying, "We're asking the question."

Then they called up, while I was there, they called up the big cheese. They didn't say it was Hoover, but this was what I was supposed to assume. "Yes, he's being very helpful." I was supposed to be impressed by this and I was somewhat .

They sent out eventually for some sandwiches. I complained it was getting late and I was hungry. I was supposed to have supper that night with a girl that was working in the office. They called her up and told her that I would be unable to meet her.

Eventually we were taken, quite late at night, to the U.S.Commissioner's office to be arraigned. He set bail at $10,000. All three of us were there, Roth, and [Emmanuel S.] Larsen, and myself, the three people in Washington. The other three people accused in the Amerasia case were in New York.

[315]

J. SERVICE: You can see from the picture that I'm angry. By this time it was late at night. There's a picture of the three of us sitting like--I made an ill-advised complaint to the commissioner. The FBI likes to get maximum publicity for all this sort of stuff, so they had all the newspapers alerted.

This is Larsen. He tried to talk to me in Chinese, and I said I didn't think it was a good idea for us to be talking in Chinese there, with the newspaper people all hanging around. That made him very angry; he was a strange character. He wanted to find out what I knew, who else had been arrested.

Of course, none of us knew any of the details, who was involved. It was obvious that they were interested in Jaffe. Most of their questioning was about him.

Jail. Charged under the Espionage Act

J. SERVICE: We were taken to jail and processed in. This was very late at night. This is not much to waste time over. Processing into jail is about the same, I suppose, anywhere.

There's an account in Solzhenitsyn's First Circle of a young chap who was a foreign office guy being taken to Lubyanka, and it's not too different from the District of Columbia jail.

LEVENSON: What did they do?

J. SERVICE: You're forced to strip--you take off all your clothes--shoved into a shower room, wash off thoroughly, given a one piece garment. Mine was ripped in the crotch, and I said, "Can't I get another one?" [imitating jailer] "You better take it. It gets pretty cold up there in the cell block, ha, ha, ha." You know, this sort of thing. The attitude of the people in these places is pretty chilling.

You're put into a cell. You've got a blanket and a mattress, absolutely nothing else in there. They won't let you have a belt or anything like that. This was very late at night by the time this was all finished.

The next morning they took me down to finish the processing, which they hadn't been able to do the night before because the photographers weren't on duty, and I had to be photographed.

[316]

J. SERVICE: By then the jailers were very much interested because the daily papers had come out, big spread, pictures. "Hey, you pretty big guy, huh? What'd ya think of this? Must be hot stuff." sort of attitude.

You asked a while ago about how I felt: I think that the period in jail, especially when I woke up the next day, was very, very depressing because you felt so completely disgraced. You know, how could one possibly come back from this sort of public degradation? I was pretty low.

I wanted to telephone, but the official rule is that you can only telephone your immediate family. Caroline was in California. I saw no point in trying to phone her. Apart from
your immediate family, you can phone a lawyer.

I didn't know a lawyer, so, they said, "Here s a list." They've got a list that they give you. These are lawyers who presumably are interested in taking care of people in on larceny or burglary charges or routine things. But, I didn't want any of these lawyers. I wasn't going to call up just a lawyer blind. My case was not the ordinary run-of-the-mill criminal case that most of these guys were used to handling.

By afternoon my sister-in-law--My younger brother's wife was in Washington. He was in Moscow. She had had a hard time in Moscow. The kids had been sick and there was no satisfactory housing. They had come back to Washington just shortly before.

She had gotten in touch with people in the State Department and they in turn had talked to the former judge of the U.S. Court for China, Judge [Milton John] Helmick, who was in Washington. They had arranged bond and that evening, that night actually--I was only in there one full day--I came out.

The next day I had to go around and talk to the bondsman who was a black man, very pleasant guy. He wanted to meet me, apparently, and get some sort of an opinion of how good a risk I was.

LEVENSON: That's unusual, I think.

J. SERVICE: Well, maybe. Maybe he wasn't used to handling espionage. After all, you see, I was charged under the Espionage Act, which is silly because none of us were accused of espionage really. But there wasn't any other act apparently that could be used.

Using the Espionage Act, of course, gave the Chinese Kuomintang press a field day because they cheerfully and loudly printed that I was a Japanese agent, Japanese spy.

[317]

No Help from the State Department

LEVENSON: What sort of help did you get from the State Department?

J. SERVICE: None at all. The State Department was almost immediately subjected to a lot of criticism. Roth had a book in the press which was critical of State Department policy on Japan. Roth represented the American left, which thought we ought to get rid of the Japanese emperor because he was a war criminal, had certainly been involved in decisions and couldn't be absolved of all responsibility.

Grew was the other side. We must preserve the emperor as an institution that will help hold the country together.

Jaffe was also sort of left. He was Communist or very close to the Communists. He was a very good friend of Earl Browder, who was the leader of the American Communist party during the war.

Gayn generally was considered liberal.

At any rate, the liberal press, New Republic, P.M., which was a newspaper in New York then, Washington Post, Irving Stone, even Winchell and a lot of the columnists, felt that the Amerasia case was politically motivated, the whole thing. And they had good cases—precedents--where classified material had been made available to people like Ernest Lindley who spoke for the State Department point of view.

There was a famous case at this time of Lindley having written some article in Harper's or Atlantic Monthly based entirely on classified State Department materials that were made available to him.

I think Grew was the acting secretary at this time for a short while. James F. Byrnes may have been out here at the UN meeting and Grew was therefore acting in Washington. At the first press conference, Grew made some remark, "Well, it's really nothing to fuss about. We heard a noise out in the chicken coop, so we just went out there and caught the fox."

LEVENSON: The fox being you?

J. SERVICE: Yes, I and the others. So, at any rate, I went around to the State Department and asked to see somebody and of course, couldn't see Grew, but I saw somebody in the Secretary's office.

[318]

J. SERVICE: I said, "Look, I object to this sort of statement . It's prejudging the case." The man looked as though he'd seen a ghost. He said, "You mean, you're not guilty?"

I said, "Of course, I'm not guilty. I'm going to be cleared, and it is very foolish of the State Department to make this kind of statement."

The State Department discontinued [chuckling] such statements.

Choice of a Lawyer: No Common Cause with the Other Defendants

J. SERVICE: At any rate, to go back to the account, Judge Helmick had made some inquiries, and he'd heard of a man named [Richard Strobach] Munter, M-u-n-t-e-r.

I went around to see Munter. He was very confused by the whole thing, just as the FBI people were confused. They couldn't understand why I had all these Communist materials, why I was interested in Communists, why I was dealing with Communism, and all the rest of it. He couldn't understand all the ramifications of the case. It seemed very complicated to him. He'd never had anything like this. But, he agreed to handle it on a contingency basis. I had to pay him $2,000 down, which my mother loaned me, as I recall. He made the various appearances that were necessary--you plead not guilty and so on--appearances in court.

Then we waited for a grand jury. The government took it to a grand jury that was about to expire and then withdrew it for reasons we don't really know. They may have had some problems in the case.

In this early period, I was angry. I felt that my career had been ruined. It just didn't seem to be possible that I could come back into the State Department disgraced. I was thinking about resigning, about taking a job as a newspaper man. The New York Post was interested in my working for them.

I went up to New York. Larry Salisbury had just retired from the State Department. He was working for the IPR in New York. I went there. I saw lots of friends in New York, people that had been in China, Epsteins and other people- Gunther Stein was in New York--and talked to a lot of people.

[319]

J. SERVICE: Some of the other people in the case wanted to get in touch with me, wanted to work together. The Field papers, P.M. and the Chicago Sun, I think it was, owned and operated then by Marshall Field who was quite a liberal guy, supplied a lawyer and took over the defense for Gayn because Gayn was writing for them.

They offered to take on my defense, but I thought I'd better not make common cause with any of these other people, just do it on my own.

I had talked to Currie and people like that who were much concerned, Vincent, in the State Department. I had talked to a lot of Foreign Service friends, and they urged me--and it began to sort of sink in--to calm down and to fight the thing out, since I was innocent of anything beyond indiscretion, which was not an uncommon kind of indiscretion. They convinced me that I would win and be able to continue and the public impression would be much better than resigning.

So this was what I finally did. Currie urged me to talk to a man named Corcoran, "Tommy the Cork," who was a very good friend of his. All these people were New Dealers together. It ended up with Corcoran actually as my lawyer, unofficially, with Munter the front man.

I've got a long memorandum here that I had to write in '51 for the lawyers which we'll put in the record. I don't see any point in my repeating a lot of it (0n deposit in The Bancroft Library). . [tape off]

These are actually two memoranda that I wrote in early 1951. This first one gives a more detailed account of what I was doing after the arrest, and it leads into the Currie-Corcoran contact, Currie putting me on to Corcoran and Corcoran taking over. The second one completes it and goes into specific detail about my relations with Corcoran.

[320]

Links Between the FBI, "Mary" Miles, and Tai Li: An Early Collaboration to Prepare Jack as Scapegoat for America's "Loss of China"

LEVENSON: Now, more than thirty years later, have you arrived at a judgment as to why you were picked as the prime culprit for America s so-called loss of China?

J. SERVICE: Yes. The Chinese were looking for a scapegoat after the Stilwell affair blew up in their face. They'd had it in for me for various obvious reasons.

LEVENSON: But there is also, an FBI angle in here that I think--I can't prove it--but I think is quite clear. I've mentioned the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, SACO which was a navy and Chinese secret service, Tai Li, operation. The Chinese wanted to get police instructors, instructors in police methods. They had had this from the Germans, but after Pearl Harbor the Germans had finally departed. So the Chinese wanted whatever the Americans could offer.

J. SERVICE: "Mary" Miles was quite proud of the fact that he had FBI cooperation. I don't know whether these people were on leave, but he always spoke of them as FBI people working in his outfit, supposedly on police methods, police training. The Chinese Communists say that they were also instructors in methods of torture. There were FBI people there.

According to "Mary" Miles, they taught things like poisons, drugs, and God knows what secret means of murder like we've heard about the CIA trying to use against Castro. "Mary" spoke about this quite freely in his talks with American government officials as one of the advantages of his arrangement.

There was a lot of opposition among Americans and also among Chinese to collaboration of this type with Tai Li. Stilwell was opposed, and Wedemeyer was opposed to it. Stilwell told me once that Marshall had told him you just had to quit fighting it because Admiral [Ernest Joseph] King had put his foot down, insisting that the navy was going to have a piece of the action. So, there was nothing we could do about the "Mary" Miles --

LEVENSON: King?

J. SERVICE: Admiral King was the chief of naval operations. He was the opposite number of George C. Marshall who was the head of the army.

[321]

J. SERVICE: I had written quite a number of memos about Chinese hatred of Tai Li and the political dangers in our collaboration, some for Wedemeyer and some for Stilwell. I had been asked about this by Jaffe, and I had mentioned something about it. Jaffe knew about it.

Jaffe's telephone was tapped, and the FBI certainly knew about my view, my criticism of the association with Tai Li. But, the interesting thing is that never, in all the accusations and interrogations, has anything of this surfaced.

It's a suspicious fact because the FBI leaked all sorts of things to friendly newspaper people and to friendly people like the counsel for the minority in the Tydings hearings. But this has never leaked, and the fact that it hasn't leaked makes me suspicious.

The FBI told the Department of Justice within a week of my return from China--or I think on the very day I returned from China--that they had solved the Amerasia case and were willing to have it taken to court. This was before I'd ever met Jaffe. When I stumbled into this, I think they obviously wanted to have me included.

In the Tydings hearings, the Department of Justice was asked about my inclusion in Amerasia or the timing, and they made sort of a lame excuse: "Well there was information indicating contacts, and ninety percent of cases are solved after arrest by confession." So, they thought it was worthwhile to arrest me. But they admit themselves that the case against me was very weak.

When Hurley resigned later on [November 26, 1945], he made various accusations about my giving my reports to the Chinese Communists. He and other people spread reports about my contacts with Chinese women and so on, particularly Chou En-lai's secretary, as I mentioned before.

It wasn't until Hurley agreed to testify in the Davies case in 1953 that we discovered that he'd been fed forged materials by Tai Li, forged materials supposed to be notes between me and Teddy White, who was the Time man, setting up meetings to discuss opposition to Hurley and how we could get Hurley recalled, things like this. These were forged notes. No such meetings took place and no such notes were ever exchanged.

I don't think that Tai Li--who insisted that Hurley not show these to anyone else and then return them to him--I don't think that Tai Li's people, Chinese, were up to doing this in a very convincing way. I think they undoubtedly had cooperation.

[322]

LEVENSON: From the FBI?

J. SERVICE: From the FBI people or from "Mary" Miles' people who were with the FBI people. I think that the fact that my sister-in-law picked up this story from a wife of a Chinese embassy person that I was going to be in trouble, indicates there was collaboration very early on.

LEVENSON: When did she pick this up?

J. SERVICE: It was before my arrest, some time before my arrest.

LEVENSON: Did she alert you?

J. SERVICE: No. I didn't hear about it until later.

LEVENSON: Why was that?

J. SERVICE: Because I don't think anyone thought anything of it. It was lady gossip, that sort of thing. I think that it is obvious that there was collaboration between the FBI, navy and Justice.

When I was in Japan at the end of '45, Wedemeyer came through, going from China to the States for consultation. He wanted to get hold of me and John Emmerson who'd been out in China. He was very friendly and told us that he'd written commendations for us. I think we already knew about the commendations. But he'd also put in to get us a medal which the army can give to civilians for meritorious actions.

When he came back from the States he did not see us. The only person he saw was a man named [Max] Bishop whom he'd known in Southeast Asia Command. Bishop had been in Ceylon, political adviser down there. He told Bishop--I didn't know this from Bishop directly; I only know it second hand from somebody that Bishop told it to--that Wedemeyer had seen J. Edgar Hoover and had been told by J. Edgar that they had evidence that Service was a Communist but they couldn't prove it in court.

Hoover obviously had a great interest in the case. One of McCarthy's favorite lines was that Hoover had said there was a hundred percent air tight case "against Service." Well, when we pinned Hoover down--he never would reply directly--but he replied through the Department of Justice, he said he'd never made such a statement. This was a statement that I think very obviously he had made or FBI people had made.

[323]

J. SERVICE: All this is not really answering why I was arrested, but describing maybe how it happened. I think unquestionably FBI interest in the case was prompted by FBI cooperation with the Chinese secret police under Tai Li.

Then, Fulton Lewis apparently also picked up something; he was broadcasting then for Mutual Broadcasting Company. This was before the big days of TV, and he was a very popular radio news broadcaster then. Mutual, I think, was very worried about the broadcast. They got in touch apparently with Corcoran. This was why these memos were written, to try to get the record straight.

We have a transcript of the broadcast which we had in advance. My interlineations are where he departed from the actual script. He adds a word here and there with a very, you know, accented, sarcastic tone. He makes it a much more lively document orally than it appears in the cold print.

LEVENSON: How did you get an advance copy?

J. SERVICE: Because Mutual got in touch with Corcoran. Corcoran talked, I think, to Mutual, and the script was more or less agreed on. I'm sure it was not as libelous as it originally was. Also, it does not reveal the fact, the obvious fact, which was that the FBI was tapping telephones. I don't know how many phones. But, the original accusation in the Fulton script would have involved the attorney general of the United States in giving information about the case to Corcoran.

State Department Security Entirely in FBI Hands

LEVENSON: Were you aware at the time that your phone was tapped? You say, "of course" now.

J. SERVICE: Yes, we assumed by this time that we were tapped.

LEVENSON: I'm speaking about '45.

J. SERVICE: Forty-five, yes. After the arrest we assumed we were tapped.

LEVENSON: But, before the arrest --

J. SERVICE: No, we didn't--no. I had no feeling of threat or of anything wrong at all. After my arrest, then everybody in the State Department assumed their phone was tapped. Everyone in FE assumed their phone was tapped.

[324]

LEVENSON: Do you now, and did you then--sounds like a pickup of the McCarthy style speech--bitterly resent the lack of support you got from the State Department?

J. SERVICE: Oh, no.

LEVENSON: I'm sorry. That was a loaded question. I'd rather rephrase it. It's unimaginable to me that you'd be thrown to the dogs in that way.

J. SERVICE: Well, the State Department was completely unorganized for anything. They had no security division or security section. They had one man who was sort of liaison with the FBI and a couple other agencies, who was in charge. They just left security entirely up to the FBI.

The FBI apparently suspected everyone in FE, or practically everyone in FE, because in their eyes the whole State Department policy of being agreeable to collaboration, cooperation with Chinese Communists, was just crazy. It was one that they couldn't fathom.

I don't think that anyone at the top of the State Department kept in touch with what was going on or realized what the FBI action was going to lead to. [John Carter] Vincent was head of FE and he was, I think, under suspicion just as the rest of us were.

The security liaison, a fellow named Lyon, just left everything in the hands of the FBI.

I certainly resented the Grew statement which I protested, about the fuss in the chicken coop and catching the fox. Nothing like that happened again. Well, one might say the State Department could have warned me, but I think once things were started, why, there wasn't very much they could have done. If they had known more at the top, they might have educated the guy at the bottom as to what was going on.

I acted in a completely unbureaucratic manner. I was talking to people, very freely and frankly, talking outside the State Department. I loaned reports. They weren't from the files. They were my own reports. This was all a little bit irregular. I obviously felt that I had authority to discuss things with the press, which I had had in China but didn't really have in Washington. It had never been clarified, how much authority I had in Washington to behave in the way I was behaving.

[325]

J. SERVICE: We had already reached a point, as I said, in the Department of having a debate as to what policy should be, whether we should try to maintain a neutral position in China. Some of us were already talking fairly freely that we were backing the wrong horse if we got behind the KMT.

China Policy: State Department in Ignorance of the Yalta Agreement for Four Months

LEVENSON: The Yalta agreement was February 11, 1945. According to the resume that appears in the Tydings hearings, the Chinese Communists did not learn about it until much later.

J. SERVICE: Yes, I m sure they didn't know about it until July or August. Of course, the State Department didn't know about it themselves until July. Chiang Kai-shek named a Communist member to the Chinese mission at the UN conference that established the UN. I saw them in Washington in August, early August I guess it was, and told them about Yalta. I think it was a surprise to them.

The operating people in FE did not learn about the Yalta agreements until they were on the ship going to the Potsdam Conference. Vincent was a member of the group that went with Truman to the Potsdam Conference which was July.

They had been told to prepare position papers to guide the delegation's discussion on policy in the Far East. While they were on the ship, Secretary of State Byrnes came down to Vincent's cabin and, according to Vincent's account to me, threw the papers on the bed and said, "Sorry, but these are all no use," and then proceeded to tell Vincent about the Yalta agreements. This of course threw all of our thinking and planning into a cocked hat. Up to that time we'd all been operating blind, all the assumption about American neutrality in China were meaningless.

LEVENSON: What comment do you care to make on that, thirty years past the date?

J. SERVICE: Incredible. To keep your own operating people in ignorance is bad. But, the terrible thing was that the Yalta agreement was founded on such completely erroneous reasoning and assumptions. It was based on the idea that if we made a deal with Stalin, the Chinese Communists would very nicely and quietly go along with what Stalin told them to do, which was the exact opposite of what all of us in the field were busily reporting.

[326]

J. SERVICE: Who advised Roosevelt and how he came to the idea is still a mystery. But, it guaranteed the civil war, which was what we all had been working so hard to prevent. We knew a civil war would not only be a long, drawn out, disastrous civil war-- but it would result in a Communist victory. I must say by this time some of us weren't sure that was a bad thing, but for American policy it was certainly a bad thing.

Jack Cleared Unanimously by Grand Jury on Amerasia Charges

J. SERVICE: Back to Amerasia. The big issue was whether or not I was to appear before the grand jury voluntarily. If you're the accused and volunteer to appear before the grand jury, you waive all rights, all immunity, and you have no counsel present.

The lawyers were concerned because the case on the surface looked so weak that we assumed that there must be some manufactured stuff or some Chinese stuff in the background. We wanted to find out whether or not it was just what we knew about or whether there was some trap being laid.

Corcoran eventually called me and said, "Okay, everything is all right. You can go ahead." I suppose my phone was tapped, but Corcoran's phone was probably also tapped. The person who Corcoran presumably talked to was Tom Clark, who was the attorney general. This was introduced into the Tydings hearings, presumably based on leaks (or information) from FBI people.

During the McCarthy period there were two very new and popular professions that got a lot of attention, ex-Communists and ex-FBI officers. Ex-FBI people were all over the map and providing all sorts of information and getting jobs as security people, becoming experts and advisers to people running blacklists and so on.

Robert Morris, the minority counsel for the Tydings committee, obviously had information that some sort of--information, I used the wrong word--some accusation, some sort of a fix, was put in. So, he interrogated me in the hearings.

LEVENSON: Jack, at this point I think that I would like to ask you--because I realize that we're only at the beginning of your loyalty hearings--what were the forums and dates of your various judicial and legislative and administrative hearings?

[327]

J. SERVICE: The easiest way to answer that is to simply insert here a list that I prepared for my lawyer, Mr. [Charles Edward] Rhetts, at one point. Does it have a date on it?

LEVENSON: Oh, that s fine (See Appendix II).

J. SERVICE: This gives a list of all of them, I think.

LEVENSON: Good. As far as I can recall, the only case in which there was a jury of ordinary people was the grand jury in the Amerasia case. How did you feel about presenting your case--and I know you appeared voluntarily--before ordinary, non-specialist people?

J. SERVICE: [chuckling] Nineteen forty-five is quite a long time ago. Actually I didn't have a chance to present my case. I submitted myself for questioning--is really what it amounted to. The Department of Justice attorney, in other words the equivalent of a prosecuting attorney, asked me various questions about my involvement with Jaffe and the other people, but primarily Jaffe. These were all facts that had pretty well been gone over. I was repeating some of the material that had been in my statement that I gave to the FBI, which I assumed the grand jury had. They obviously were familiar with the general circumstances of the case.

Then the foreman of the grand jury took over and asked some questions. This was not especially hostile. It was not particularly difficult questioning because it related to fairly recent events, and as I say, it had been gone over.

Then the foreman and some of the other members of the grand jury asked some questions about relations between people in my position, the government, and the press, particularly when they had information, as I did, about developments in foreign countries the press people couldn't get to, get direct knowledge of.

It was a fairly friendly--friendly is too strong a word--non-hostile meeting. It was what, twenty people. I don't remember the composition now really, but it was just sort of a cross section. They were neither friendly nor unfriendly I think, certainly not out to get me. It lasted--it's hard to say now whether it was an hour or two hours. It wasn't a terribly long hearing.

[328]

J. SERVICE: I think I mentioned the fact that I'd had a son born that morning, and that I hoped that it was going to be a good day for me. They sort of laughed in a friendly way.

Of course, the Senate committee was quite a different matter. That was divided very strongly. The Tydings committee was two Republicans one of whom, Hickenlooper , was very unfriendly, and three Democrats who generally were on my side I felt.

You had two counsel, one majority counsel who was inclined to try to develop the case in a way that was favorable to you, and a minority counsel who was vicious. He was later the man who was the committee counsel in the IPR hearings, Robert Morris. He was obviously being fed information by the FBI and any place else he could get rumor or gossip and scandal.

LEVENSON: We can talk about that later as we get to that. Thank you.

J. SERVICE: You want to turn that thing off?

LEVENSON: Okay. [tape off]

The Family's Reaction

LEVENSON: What was your family's response to these events? You've described your reaction to your arrest as total disgrace.

J. SERVICE: The family didn't accept that. I think all of our spirits picked up pretty much when, as I say, a large section of the press, including the Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and so on, became critical of the way the whole case had been handled, the way it seemed to be politically motivated, to silence critics and so on.

My mother never faltered. I've got correspondence which I think we can put in as papers. We don't need to have them all in the record here. Caroline was obviously distraught. She came on to Washington fairly soon from Berkeley. I'd already gotten a house. I think we were waiting for the children to finish school. She had her baby the day that the first [atomic] bomb dropped and the grand jury met. And the day that the grand jury decision was announced was the day that the Japanese announced they were willing to surrender.

LEVENSON: You certainly were upstaged by a number of enormous international events!

[328a]

The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 21, 1945

Reparation

Little attention was paid to the action of the grand jury last week in the case of the six officials and journalists charged with dealing in secret documents. There were matters of greater import to think about, but now that the mind is more or less
accommodated to the end of the war, the case should not be unheeded. It was held by the grand jury that insufficient evidence existed even to warrant a court trial of Jack Service of the State Department, Mark Gayn. a free lance journalist, and Kate Louise Mitchell of Amerasia magazine. Their bail of $10,000 each, accordingly, is being refunded. The
case of the other three--E. S. Larsen of the State Department, Andrew Roth of the Office of Naval Intelligence and Philip J. Jaffa of Amerasia--will go to trial. The charge is one of conspiracy in the abstraction and use of Government files and records.

Any comment on the case of the three against whom indictments have been preferred must be suspended till the case has been dealt with in court. The three persons who have been allowed to go free, however, deserve something more than a grand jury release. The release has fortified the feeling on the part of those, ourselves included, that the action of the State Department had a political motivation. Leaks of so-called secret memoranda are by no means uncommon in Government departments. This is so well known that the fact that this was the only case to be taken up gave it the appearance of persecution. Former Undersecretary Grew, knowing full well that the singling out of these persons was of itself suspicious, promised at the time that the charge was the beginning of a general investigation. His implication was that the sources and recipients of other leaks would be proceeded against. But there has been no suggestion of any further proceedings, and it is our guess that the investigation stopped with this case.

The case, as the outcome of the grand jury inquiry bears out, was so thin that the lay man could not help but get the impression that espionage was in the State Department mind. Three persons have been cleared not only of that cloud but also of responsibility for leakages; reparation in the public mind, however, is still their due. We suggest that Secretary Byrnes should make amends to the released three without delay as a matter of elementary justice. In respect of Mr. Service, reparation should take the form of reinstatement as well as apology. And what was back of the incident, in the absence of a statement from the department, deserves inquiry by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The morale of the entire department, as well as the integrity of the public service, is involved in the clearing up of the atmosphere in which this case is wrapped.

[329]

J. SERVICE: I forget how I got news of this. The minority counsel on the Tydings committee tried to make something out of it, that I heard it from the Department of Justice. I'm sure I didn't hear it from the Department of Justice-- it was probably from one of my lawyers, Munter probably.

I was downtown and walked around to the Washington Post--I knew the Washington Post people quite well; they were friendly--and went in to see Herb Elliston the editor. He had been in China in the early days--a lot of newspaper people had wandered to the Far East and worked on English language papers in China or in Japan.

I said, "It's just my luck that the grand jury clears me on a day that all the front page will be about Japanese surrender. He said, "Don't worry, you'll be on the front page," and so I was, in a small story.

Pro Forma Probation and a Posting to Japan

J. SERVICE: The Department then was confronted with having to do something about me. I was asked to appear before something called the Foreign Service Personnel Board, which doesn't meet very often, but is supposed to handle disciplinary cases.

I think they were a little embarrassed. The man who was running it, Julius Holmes, who was I think partly responsible for the way the thing was handled in the State Department -- in other words in accepting the idea that all of FE was under suspicion--he said, "Service, you certainly violated this regulation." He showed me a regulation about criticism to newspaper people of officials of friendly governments.

This was a regulation that had been passed during the 1939-40 years when a lot of Americans were unhappy about American neutrality and very critical of the Nazis. This had been put in the regulations then to stop Americans sounding off about Hitler openly.

I said, "Yes, of course, I violated this." They said, "We'll have to put you on probation." The time was limited. Maybe it was six months.

Then, they said they'd send me to a European post. I said I thought it would be a mistake to send me to a European post since the Chinese Kuomintang papers had made such a field day

[330]

J. SERVICE: out of this thing, accused me of being a Japanese spy. I thought that it would be wise of the Department to send me to a place in the Far East, although everyone realized I couldn't go back to China where I would be persona non grata.

So, they said they'd think about that, and in a few days they asked if I'd be interested in going to Tokyo with George Atcheson. He had indicated he'd be willing to have me. I was very pleased. George was being sent as State Department representative with MacArthur. So I went out to Japan with George to be his executive officer, his number two.

Washington Post Editorial: Accused with Maximum Publicity; Cleared with No Publicity

J. SERVICE: Before that though, Elliston of the Washington Post had called up and asked me to drop by. He asked me what the State Department had done--this was about August 20. I said that I'd been reinstated, I'd gone back to work, and that I had received a letter, I think, from Byrnes and from Grew.

He said, "By God, I think that we ought to say something about this. There's been no publicity." I said, "I m not sure that I can release these letters to the press." He said, "Don't worry. We'll take care of it."

The next day he had an editorial, quite a nice editorial about doing something about people that get accused with a lot of publicity but cleared with no publicity.

I went down to see Ben Cohen who was regarded as a friend of Currie's. I said that it seemed to me that the State Department ought to let me release the letters from Byrnes and Grew. He said, "Don't do anything. I'll take care of it." This was Ben Cohen who was another one of the New Deal crowd that had come into Washington with Roosevelt in the '30s, been a big figure in the early days and close associate of Corcoran's.

The next day at the Secretary of State's press conference these two letters were given out as a press release. You can have them if you want them, but they've been printed in many places. So then I was officially reinstated.

LEVENSON: Clean as a whistle?

[331]

J. SERVICE: Clean as a whistle. All right now--I had an odd footnote to that though, [chuckling] Late in August, before I went to Japan, I happened to be in FE when Grew, who was resigning, came around to say his farewells. Of course, he was an FE man originally himself, a Far East man.

I was a little bit embarrassed. I felt this was maybe not the place to be. But everybody was sort of falling in line, so I fell into the tail of the line. Grew was coming along, shaking people's hands. But somehow before [chuckling] Grew got to me, he just changed his direction and went off. Apparently he didn't want to shake my hand!

LEVENSON: Embarrassed?

J. SERVICE: I don't know what was in his mind, but we didn't have our meeting at any rate.

Various things happened during my arrest period that were sort of interesting. I don't know whether they're worth mentioning or not .

Stilwell was then out in Okinawa. He'd taken over command of the Tenth Army when commanding General [Simon Bolivar, Jr.] Buckner was killed. His family had me around for breakfast to show solidarity and support.

The Chinese Communists had a member in the delegation that came to the San Francisco UN conference. It was Tung Pi-wu, an old friend of mine. He was accompanied by Ch'en Chia-k'ang. The delegation came to Washington from San Francisco. Linebarger, who had been in Chungking but was now back here, arranged a supper for them. Some of us who'd been in Chungking came to the supper. I went around also and saw them in their hotel.

When we came out of the room, out of their room in the Raleigh Hotel--a rather rundown hotel in Washington--as soon as we came out of the room, two men came out of another room, a few doors down the hall. It was so obvious--came out and waited for the elevator with us because they were obviously seeing who it was. It's just a very obvious FBI tactic.

I had become more accustomed to the FBI at this time. The FBI used to tail me for a while. Eventually I think they gave up tailing me, but we assumed that our phone was tapped always.

LEVENSON: Were you ostracized, cut, et cetera, by people other than Grew who wouldn't shake your hand?

[332]

J. SERVICE: Not at all. This was a big surprise. As I said, my first feelings were that this is a terrible, terrible disgrace, to be arrested on espionage charges. The Vietnam War objectors got used to going to jail. It became sort of a badge of honor. But, under those circumstances, it felt like an unmitigated disgrace.

But I remember Vincent introduced me to Dean Acheson, who was assistant secretary at that time I think. Acheson joked about it, "Well, you don t look like such a dangerous man."

I had lunch at the Metropolitan Club with Mortimer Graves, who was the secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies, and he was very much interested. He became treasurer of a legal fund that was started to raise a little money to pay costs.

I don't recall anybody, except people like Dooman and a few Japan types, who seemed to treat me as a leper. Most of the people carried on as normal.

While Out on Bail, Served as Expert Consultant to the Pentagon on Report on the Chinese Communists

J. SERVICE: One interesting experience. An officer over in the Pentagon called me. He was Wedemeyer's man in the Operations Department, OPD, in the Pentagon. Colonel Lincoln, "Abe Lincoln" he was called. He said, "We've got a big report here," and showed me two big volumes that had been prepared by their research people. They had a big research shop in the Pentagon working on China.

He said, "We've got a summary here that's been prepared. We think it's pretty good, and Wedemeyer thinks it's pretty good, and we'd like you to look it over."

I started looking at the summary and things began to seem odd, mentions of "Soviet-type this and that." So I went back to the basic stuff, and a distortion was clear.

LEVENSON: This was an account of what?

J. SERVICE: An analysis of the Chinese Communists.

[333]

J. SERVICE: It had been prepared by the research people in Washington. It was based primarily on our reporting from Yenan, not only mine but all the other army and OSS people sending in reports, various reports from other sources. It was a huge compilation of stuff, as complete information as they could get on Chinese Communists.

Then, the summary had been prepared I believe, by a man who had lived in China, a naturalized American--originally a Swede--who'd been a free lance newspaperman. He was violently anti-Communist, and wrote his summary on the line that the Chinese Communists were complete appendages, stooges, of the Russian Communists, following the Russian line and methods and model.

I said, "Can I sit down for a while?" He gave me a desk. So I wrote out very hurriedly, some contrasts between what was said in the summary and what was said in the basic report and said, "The summary isn't worth a damn. It's written by someone who is so prejudiced that he just can't see straight."

Lincoln was quite surprised by this. Apparently, from what I heard later on, from people who worked in MIS (Militiary Intelligence Section), the thing was squashed. It was later on rewritten and published by [Lyman] Van Slyke at Stanford just a few years ago, thirty years or so after the event (Lyman Van Slyke, The Chinese Communist Movement; a Report of the United States War Department, July, 1945, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1968)..

It seemed odd that here I was, you know, on bail, awaiting grand jury hearings, but the Pentagon still was willing to accept my views!

"Find the Bodies" for the Tokyo Office

J. SERVICE: My duties, when I started work again were really to organize or help organize the office in Tokyo, to recruit personnel. We had to "find the bodies" to staff an office. I worked as a liaison between the Foreign Service personnel office and FE.

[334]

J. SERVICE: I went over to the Pentagon and talked to Eddie Reischauer who was working in uniform at that time, tried to get Reischauer, who was a classmate and housemate in college, interested. He decided, I think wisely, he didn't want to be a part of the occupation. So, he turned us down.

[335]

X: NORMAL FOREIGN SERVICE CAREER RESUMES, 1945-1950

MacArthur's Japan: Separate Communications Mean Separate Accommodations: Mitsui Bank Building, the Directors'` Suites

J. SERVICE: Atcheson went out to Tokyo as political adviser. An old friend from China, Reynolds, who'd worked with Pan American, was then working with the Navy, helping to operate the Navy Transportation Service, NATS. Reynolds found out that Atcheson and I were going through, and persuaded us to go NATS; it was very nice. [laughter] They were very good to us.

At any rate, we went out and landed at Yokosuko, across the bay from Tokyo. We were flown across in a small three seater plane, as I recall, over the bay. It was not long after the surrender, and all the navy was there. The whole U.S. navy, and the Japanese navy and the Australian and the British navies, joined, were all lined up there in Tokyo Bay. It was a terrific sight.

Anyway, we landed in Tokyo and our first call was, of course, on MacArthur. He was very cordial, very pleasant. He had refused to have various other State Department people. He'd refused Grew. Then Dooman thought he would get the job, but MacArthur didn't want Dooman.

He'd accepted Atcheson partly, I think, because Atcheson was not a particularly well known person, was not going to grab the limelight; and perhaps also because Atcheson was not a Japan man, would not therefore presume to advise MacArthur as an old expert. At any rate, he was cordial.

The question finally came down to communications. MacArthur was very sensitive about any outside people operating under him. He insisted on having control. Our instructions were that we were to have our own communications with the State Department.

[336]

J. SERVICE: If we'd had army communications we would have to send all our communications to the War Department. We were supposed to have our own communications sent direct to the State Department. MacArthur said, "Then you can't be in our office here. You can't be in our headquarters. You'll have to be separate."

We were told to contact the headquarters officer concerned with requisitioning Japanese buildings. John Emmerson was there by that time. He was joining us. We checked the list of buildings and found out the Mitsui main bank building hadn't been taken over. John said, "Why, that's a good building." We went over there. Most of Tokyo was flattened by the bombing and fires.

We went to the Mitsui main bank building, an imposing granite building, went in, found the building custodian--he was bowing and scraping--and said we required some space. He started showing us around downstairs.

I said, "Wait a minute. Have him bring us the blueprints," all this through an interpreter. He found the building blueprints. I said, "Where are the directors' offices?" Seventh floor. So I said, "We'll go to the seventh floor first." We went up. Beautiful panelled offices, each one about twenty-five by twenty-five or thirty by thirty. I said, "This is the space we'll take." The army was furious about it later on. [laughter]

At any rate, we set up shop. The army gave us some clerical personnel. The State Department was finding various people that lived in Japan, that had worked in Japan, some Foreign Service officers.

We had to handle a lot of Nisei Americans who'd been trapped during the war and had American citizenship. They'd been born in the States. We set up a consulate in Yokohama which handled those cases.

I won't go into a lot of detail about the work there. It was not terribly important. John Emmerson was there and worked with the government section of the headquarters, keeping in touch with all the new political parties that were starting up. All the political prisoners were released from jail. It was a very exciting time to be in Japan.

Herb Norman represented the Canadian interest there. He was a wonderful scholar, famous scholar on Japan, Meiji Japan.

[337]

Max Bishop, Volunteer Aide to the FBI, Photographs Jack's Memos to Atcheson

J. SERVICE: I've already mentioned the Wedemeyer visit and his return. Bishop, who was the man he talked to when he came back, was a State Department man on Atcheson's staff from very soon after our office was set up. Bishop was mostly interested in exploring events before Pearl Harbor.

He had been in the State Department in 1941 when they were trying to work out a modus vivendi, when there was talk of Konoye meeting Roosevelt someplace in the Pacific and having a talk. The U.S. named Konoye as a war criminal.

Bishop was furious about this and he became very much wrapped up in trying to prove that we could have averted the war by doing something else in '41. So he wasn't very helpful in the office.

Eventually, after talking to Wedemeyer, he asked one of the army GIs who was working in our office, to bring him documents on which I had made notations. I was executive officer, there was a tremendous lot of material passing through, and to save Atcheson reading everything, I would make notations or call his attention to things I thought he ought to see.

Bishop got this GI, who was sort of chief clerk, to bring these notes to him. Then he took them out of the office and was having them photographed by the local secret service people, apparently as a volunteer helper for the FBI.

LEVENSON: Why?

J. SERVICE: I think his motivation was mostly patriotic: it was also jealousy. Some of the Japan people in the State Department felt eclipsed by the fact that China men (Vincent, Atcheson) had been given the top jobs--even relating directly to Japan. The Japan men seemed excluded. Atcheson was China. I was China.

Bishop was particularly bitter. He and I had both been leading our class all the way through. Recently, with a double promotion, I had gone ahead of him. I don't know that this was one of his motives.

LEVENSON: Did he believe you to be a Communist or Communist sympathizer?

J. SERVICE: I don't know. He certainly believed me to be either a Communist dupe or Communist sympathizer, one or the other.

[338]

Hurley Resigns, Blasting Service and Atcheson: The Press Interrupt a Foreign Service Celebration

J. SERVICE: In late November the press called the office one day about a flash that had just come over the wire that Hurley had resigned. I went in and told George about it.

Some way or another we had gotten some whiskey. MacArthur wouldn't allow whiskey to be brought into Japan because shipping space was scarce. George had complained about this in the hearing of the "principal naval officer present," whatever the title is, in the dining room at the Imperial Hotel. We lived in the Imperial Hotel, George and I, which was limited to chiefs and executive officers of staff sections.

Anyway, soon after that, a case of whiskey, I.W. Harper, was delivered to George's door! For safekeeping we had taken some of this down to the office. We had the whole floor, with all the directors’ offices, including the vault. So we had it in the vault.

Without saying anything more, I just went down the hall to the vault and got a bottle of whiskey and brought it up to George's office. The rest of the staff by that time had assembled to join in the excitement. We had some paper cups and were just having good slugs of whiskey when suddenly the press was at the door, because by this time they had gotten more news about Service and Atcheson--For instance, they were the principal culprits accused by Hurley in his letter of resignation.

LEVENSON: Accused of ?

J. SERVICE: Working with the Communists, opposing American policy and telling the Communists that he didn't represent American policy. Also working with the imperialists and so on and so on.

It's a long blast, a famous blast. There's a whole section in U.S. Foreign Relations for 1945 on the Hurley resignation, which they decided was worthy of handling separately, pages 722 to 744. This contains a lot of telegrams that George sent off.

Poor George was frantic. Well, it was his first experience with anything like this. Also, he had much more at stake. He was already at the top. He was designated as ambassador to Thailand. He was temporarily in Japan before going on to his post. I think he saw his whole career being shattered.

[338a]

202

LARCHMONT, N.Y., Dec. 10, 1945
Senator TOM CONNALLY,
U.S. Senate,
Washington, D.C.:

Theodore White, who as president of foreign correspondent club of China, is eminently representative and informed, is fully empowered to testify for me.

ANNALEE JACOBY.
_____

NEW YORK, N.Y., Dec.10, 1945.

Senator TOM CONNALLY,
Washington, D.C.:

This is to inform you that Theodore White is qualified to represent my views in any statements he may make before Senate concerning State Department officials accused by Hurley stop having lived ten years China myself would be willing testify on overall China question if needed.

JACK BELDEN.

BACKGROUND OF WITNESS

The CHAIRMAN. Now, Mr. White, when did you first go to China?

Mr. WHITE. I first arrived in China in January 1939.

The CHAIRMAN. How long were you there?

Mr. WHITE. My headquarters were in Chungking, and they have been in Chungking off and on for the past 6 1/2 years. I would travel to various fronts. I have been in India for a few months, Burma, Dutch East Indies, Australia; and I had two trips back to America. I would say that the total of my years in China was 4 years, but basically it has been coming and going to the various fronts in the Far East, out of China.

The CHAIRMAN. When did you come back ?

Mr. WHITE. Two years ago.

The CHAIRMAN. Were you there while General Hurley was there?

Mr. WHITE. Yes, sir; and I was there before he was there, years before he was there, and all the while he was there.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you know Mr. George Atcheson? I believe his name is George.

Mr. WHITE. Yes, sir; I do.

The CHAIRMAN. He was a Foreign Service officer out there.

Mr. WHITE. I am very proud to know him, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you know Mr. John Service?

Mr. WHITE. I do.

DEFENSE OF ATCHESON AND SERVICE

The CHAIRMAN. It has been testified here by General Hurley that these two gentlemen, who were career men, were engaged in sabotaging the U.S. policies and efforts in China. Do you know anything about that?

Mr. WHITE. I know of no attempt whatsoever to sabotage General Hurley's policies in China by any career officer of the State Department; and if you will permit me, sir, I would like to say a few words.

The CHAIRMAN. Just go ahead in your own way.

Senator VANDENBERG. How would you know whether they were sabotaging it, or not ?

Mr. WHITE. Senator Vandenberg, we newspapermen in Chungking lived in a very rough situation. I met these men in the field. When you

______
Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, 79th Congress. First Session on the Situation in the Far East, particularly China, December 5, 6, 7, and 10, 1945. Published in United States-China Relations, Washington, 1971.

[338b]

bivouac with people you know what they think. I have had no access to any Embassy documents, but you cannot live with men day and night and be with them in discomfort and danger and not know what they think.

the American policy as laid down by Secretary Byrnes, as I understand it, was for the creation of a united, democratic china; at least that was the testimony given here last week. I know that those men zealously fought to achieve that, just by living with them. I do not think it would be possible or any member of the press in Chungking to be unaware of any conspiracy or of any attempt to sabotage Ambassador Hurley.

Senator VANDENBERG. Well, it might not be a conspiracy. It might be a difference, a very fundamental difference of opinion as to whether or not you should or should not, let us say, arm the communist forces in the north. I do not quite see how you would qualify as a witness to determine whether or not that was their point of view, and whether or not they were encouraging their own point of view.

Mr. WHITE. May I answer you as some length, sir?

Senator VANDENBERG. Oh, surely! Go ahead, because I am not being critical, I am merely being inquisitive.

Mr. WHITE. Yes. I think the basic issue here involved is this—whether or not any officer or any reporting observer of the State Department should temper his reports to agree with the opinions or prejudices of his superiors. Now, I feel that any man who tempered his actual, factual reporting in the field to agree with what his superiors thought would not only be useless to the United States but he would be dangerous. I want to make this point—that the men whom General Hurley I believe has charged so seriously, most of these people were responsible, except for Atcheson, to General Stilwell and General Wedemeyer. They were operating as part of our military intelligence network in China. They were assigned to various specific tasks. Service, for example, went to orders of General Stilwell to Yenan to investigate the situation there. Another officer, Mr. Raymond Ludden, went on orders. They reported the facts. "We want to know of what aid the Communists could be to us." "They will prove to be of great aid politically, no matter how much they were fighting the Japanese." These were military missions; these men did go there, and they reported these things. If their opinions different with those of General Hurley, that is regrettable; they reported the facts as honestly as it can be done.

I would like to tell you now, there is a very broad classification of people called "career diplomats," and in the American press they usually appear as "cookie-pushers," but these men were out in the field all the time.

The CHAIRMAN. Speak a little louder, please, sir.

Mr. WHITE. Yes, sir. Most of these people, except for Atcheson, were out in the field. They were out there in military orders. Service, for example, has a brilliant record in field service for our Government during the war. Service was the first man to go in the northwest to Kansu, to see whether the oil field which had just been discovered could be used for military purposes. Service was the first man to go into Honan Valley to find out what was going on there. He was the first man to go to Chengtu to do some of the political groundwork necessary for the construction of air bases there, to be used by the B-17 bombers that were later used in bombing Japan. Later he was to go to General Stilwell to investigate just what aid they could be to us.

DIFFERENCES OF OPINION AND HONEST REPORTING

Now, I realize that the main difference of opinion between General Hurley and Mr. Service was as to the use, the power, and the value of the Communist arms to the American policy; but it was Mr. Service's duty to report these things. Sir, I do not believe it would be possible in Chungking for a man to attempt to conspire with the "Communist armed party" as General Hurley calls it, in an attempt to overthrow the government of Chiang Kai-shek, without the press corps knowing of it. Having known Service so well, having lived with him in places like that, he would be guilty of monumental duplicity in every hour of his daily life if he were actually conspiring. You cannot talk with a man in the field for so long and not realize what he is doing. I am absolutely sure has not conspiring with anybody to overthrow our Government. He was reporting the facts as he saw them.

Senator VANDENBERG. Let me ask you a question. You keep using the word "conspiracy." I do not conceive that this is a matter of conspiracy. A man might have a perfectly honest opinion which could be deadly in its impact upon American policy. Would you say that, for instance, if we had furnished lend-lease to the Communist armed party, it probably would not have resulted in the fall of Chiang Kai-shek's government?

Mr. WHITE. If you are asking for my opinion on the China situation---

Senator VANDENBERG. Yes, I am asking for your answer to the question. Is it your opinion, if we had furnished lend-lease to the Communist armed party, that the government of Chiang Kai-shek would not have fallen?

Mr. WHITE. No, sir; I do not believe so. Furthermore, I do not believe that this is the opinion, if I may say so, of General Stilwell or of Ambassador Gauss, who I feel should be called to testify about these men. I do not think it would have fallen.

Senator VANDENBERG. If there are those who thought that it would, then their opinion of those who would recommend such a policy would necessarily be that the opinion was inimical to the American attitude?

Mr. WHITE. I quite see that there would be people who would think that, but any junior officer who would agree with the opinion of a superior when he did not sincerely believe it himself, would be guilty of gross negligence of duty. It is his duty to report on what he has seen and on what he knows of China. An employee's superiors can either accept or reject his recommendations, but he must report, as an intelligence officer, himself, the situation as he sees it.

Senator VANDENBERG. That is the question for the committee to decide, and I do not think you were in a position to say whether or not these gentlemen were or were not loyal to the service when they were doing the thing you say they ought to do. That is for us to decide.

Mr. WHITE. I am not trying to transgress upon your prerogatives,

[338c]

Senator VANDENBERG. Well, I entirely respect your opinion, but I think it is hearsay as far as this hearing is concerned, and that is the only point I am making.

Senator AUSTIN. What you are doing is corroborating or trying to corroborate the opinion of Mr. Service, is it not?

Mr. WHITE. No, sir. There is a charge leveled against these men that they were attempting to overthrow the government of Chiang Kai-shek, and that they were attempting to sabotage American policy; and I am coming here and offering to testify that these men did not do so.

Senator VANDENBERG. Have you seen the papers to which General Hurley refers, upon which he bases his charges?

Mr. WHITE. I have not seen any paper addressed to the State Department by any embassy official. I have been a war correspondent in uniform, and I have seen, as war correspondents do at headquarters, documents on the political situation of China.

Senator VANDENBERG. If the State Department was as secretive out there as it is here at home, I would not have thought you saw very much.

Mr. WHITE. I did not.

The CHAIRMAN. Is that all?

VIEWS ON AMERICAN POLICY TOWARD CHINA

Senator WILEY. No, I want to ask a question. I can agree that a great deal of what you have said would be, in legal parlance, a conclusion, but as you have pointed out, here, you might tell us what these men have actually said to you about American policy. For instance, it has been stated, here, as I recall it, American policy was clearly defined, as laid down by General Hurley, and that these men stated that was not the American policy. Did you ever hear them say that?

Mr. WHITE. Never, once! Never, once!

Senator WILEY. Did you ever hear them say or see them do anything from which anyone might draw the conclusion that Hurley was wrong about the policy and they were right?

Mr. WHITE. No, sir. I think one of the finest expressions of American policy in China is a document written by General Hurley and never published. I would like to see the text of it, because from what I am told it represents their opinions, our opinion, and his opinion at that time. It was a document General Hurley sent to Yenan. A single copy of that document is still there, in which he states his belief that an agreement could be reached in China by the various parties on the basis of a full coalition government, and in which the parties would subordinate their armies. Now, every one of his, I believe, in China, all the newspapermen, if I may speak for them, and these men, whom I have known so well, have always believed that this is the best policy to be applied.

Senator WILEY. Then so far as you know there wasn't any difference between Hurley and Service and Atcheson?

Mr. WHITE. I do not know what the precise nature of their differences was. I do know that Service and Atcheson were reporting the truth at all times. If ever General Hurley found their opinions later on differing from his, he called them an attempt to sabotage his policy. Their opinions—what they wrote to the State Department I do not know, sir. I do know that in private conversation the policy they spoke of and talked of was always the American policy, as I understood it, broadly defined by our Government.

FURNISHING LEND-LEASE TO CHINESE COMMUNISTS

Senator VANDENBERG. I would like to ask just one more question. Was it your personal opinion, Mr. White, that we should have furnished lend-lease to the Communist armed party?

Mr. WHITE. Never, without qualifying it. I am against furnishing lend-lease to anybody without certain qualifications. I believe if a coalitionist government had been achieved we should have furnished arms to all armies fighting against the Japanese.

Senator VANDENBERG. Well, that is not quite my question. My question is whether you thought that it would have been a correct policy to have furnished lend-lease under existing circumstances to the Communist armed forces?

Mr. WHITE. Under the existing circumstances? No.

Senator VANDENBERG. Well, was not that the policy that your friends believed in?

Mr. WHITE. I believe that my friends were speaking of future methods, the way the situation was likely to develop. As you know very well—I am sorry. As you know, sir, while part of our military strategy at that time called for an eventual landing on the China coast, a landing on the China coast would have been very important, in the summer of 1944. To achieve that landing you would have needed Communist help, and to have that help for our landing, I would then have been in favor of lend-lease to aid our own troops.

GOAL OF CHINESE UNIFICATION

The CHAIRMAN. Let me ask you, Mr. White. Was it not the policy, or part of the policy of General Hurley to bring about a union of the so-called Communist armed party with Chiang Kai-shek?

Mr. WHITE. I believe he tried to do so, and I believe he failed.

The CHAIRMAN. Was not that the policy of the President and of the Secretary of State?

Mr. WHITE. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. And of everybody?

Mr. WHITE. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. That policy was based upon the theory, of course, that they could get them all to unite to fight the Japanese. Now, in that event, would it have been quite appropriate to furnish them lend-lease, so they could fight the Japanese?

Mr. WHITE. Why, of course.

[338d]

The CHAIRMAN. And were not all of our representatives out there, supposedly, including General Hurley, and the State Department, here—were they not all in favor of that policy?

Mr. WHITE. They were.

The CHAIRMAN. They claimed they were in favor of that policy?

Mr. WHITE. Yes, sir.

Senator WILEY. Were you in intimate contact with these two gentlemen?

Mr. WHITE. Not with George Atcheson. With Service, yes; not with George Atcheson.

Senator WILEY. What was his reaction when he was ordered home?

Mr. WHITE. I can tell you that. I went to call on George Atcheson just before he left. He was sick in bed. He had had a hard time of it; and you will find this difficult to believe. At that time, he praised Ambassador Hurley to me.

Senator WILEY. I do not understand.

Mr. WHITE. At that time, he praised Ambassador Hurley. That was the last conversation I had with George Atcheson. My relation with Service was very intimate. We were friends of long standing.

Senator WILEY. What was his reaction when he was ordered home? Is he the man you were talking about, who got sick?

Mr. WHITE. No; that was Atcheson. Service's reaction when he was ordered home—he did not know why he was being ordered home, at the time. Both Hurley and General Wedemeyer were in Washington. He did not know why he was being called by them.

The CHAIRMAN. Are there any other matters you want to submit, Mr. White? Is there anything else you want to say?

Mr. WHITE. No, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. Now is your chance. Are there any other questions?

TESTIMONY SUPPORTED BY OTHER CORRESPONDENTS

Senator WILEY. What are those telegrams?

The CHAIRMAN. They were just telegrams from a group of other correspondents, swaying that Mr. White was authorized to speak for them—Mr. Sevareid and Mr. Belden and some others.

Senator WILEY. How long is it since you have seen these correspondents?

Mr. WHITE. Perhaps 3 or 4 days, in New York.

Senator WILEY. They were all over there with you?

Mr. WHITE. In New York?

Senator WILEY. Were they all over in China with you?

Mr. WHITE. At various times. We were never all there at any one time, but all of us know the people who are under attack, and we wanted a chance to proclaim in public our faith in their loyalty and in their honesty and in their good service for our Government. That is, we feel that these men who underwent hardship, were really ordered into danger by our Government, should not be hauled up in public and so attacked without somebody speaking in their defense. They did work for our Government, which I believe was finer intelligence work than the organization of any other foreign country. It was magnificent work. Mr. Raymond Ludden, for example, went on a secret mission behind the Japanese lines, into the province of Hopei. It had been 6 years since any American observer had been there. It was a six-man mission. One of those men was killed, a captain of the Army. The other members of the mission were decorated. Mr. Ludden came back to Chungking, in January or February, I believe. It was, I believe, under the impact of his reportage, and what went on behind the lines and in the Communist areas, that Mr. Atcheson's report, to which Mr. Hurley referred, was drawn up.

We were surprised at these charges against them when we read them in new York, and we felt that we should tell the committee that we, as a nonpartisan group of newspapermen, felt that they had served our country as honorably as possible.

Senator WILEY. That is why you came down?

Mr. WHITE. Yes, sir.

Senator WILEY. Representing that group?

Mr. WHITE. Yes, sir. I have an aversion for seeing my friends falsely slandered.

The CHAIRMAN. That is all. The committee will recess until tomorrow morning, when we will meet in executive session in the committee room.

(Whereupon, at 12:30 o'clock, the committee recessed until tomorrow, Tuesday, December 11, 1945, at 10:30 o'clock, in the committee room.)

[339]

J. SERVICE: At any rate, I wrote the State Department a long message answering Hurley's charges which again, I suppose, we can make reference to. It's page 733 to 738 of U.S. Foreign Relations. 1945, volume 7.

LEVENSON: Did you feel dangerously threatened by this?

J. SERVICE: No, I don't think so. It seemed to be just a venomous kick from a senile, old fool. It seemed so incredible.

I had come through the Amerasia case and been cleared. Hurley had been frustrated that I hadn't been fired in the Amerasia case, and of course he had failed in China.

By this time the two parties in China were squaring off at each other. Hurley's attempts to bring about a peaceful settlement right after the signing of the Russian-Chinese treaty at the end of the war hadn't worked. What we predicted was coming true. The Chinese Communists were not going to lie down and play dead.

I felt that the Hurley letter, and its patently absurd accusations, was something that would be taken care of fairly soon. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee did hold hearings. Hurley did make a fool of himself. They discontinued the hearings because he couldn't make any case at all.

The hearings were buried until a few years ago when Fulbright dug them out and reprinted them as being of new and timely interest after the Nixon visit [1972] was announced. Up to that time it was sort of collector's item since it had existed only in transcript form.

Caroline was at the hearings. The official reporter was so interested that she was the wife of one of the men being accused that he gave her a copy of the transcript. That was quite a gift because you pay by the page for those things. Jack [George] Kerr brought it out to me in Tokyo.

A Siege in Hospital: Infectious Hepatitis

J. SERVICE: In April I got quite ill, fever, and so on, and went to the hospital and they said I had infectious hepatitis. Admission to the army hospital (the old St. Luke's in Tokyo) was complicated
by my Foreign Service status. The army manual categorized civilians only by their CAF (Clerical and Fiscal) rating. So they didn't know what kind of accommodation to put me in.

[340]

J. SERVICE: MacArthur's army was run strictly by the numbers. They finally decided to admit me to an enlisted man's ward. I eventually worked my way up through the hospital. I was there for four months.

LEVENSON: Good Lord.

J. SERVICE: There was nothing much they could do for infectious hepatitis. I didn't really care too much. They gave me glucose intravenously, and after about twenty-four hours I felt all right. I had a miserable diet, no fat at all.

Eventually they moved me into better rooms and better rooms. I became ambulatory, got a lot of chess, eventually a lot of bridge. They had jigsaw puzzles which I eventually became able to do upside down. The cookie-cutter design was standard! [laughter]

The State Department was, I think, concerned about my long illness. We'd been trying to get the family out to Japan, but the army didn't have housing. Housing was very short. We never did succeed in getting that.

Then, they were going to send me home by hospital ship, but various things happened. I finally was released from the hospital in late August, came home by freighter, twelve passengers. By that time the State Department decided to send me to New Zealand.

Some Contributions of the Political Advisers' Office

LEVENSON: Before we go on to New Zealand, do you have any comments you'd like to make on the occupation and MacArthur's regime in Japan?

J. SERVICE: I don't particularly want to go into all that. We could talk for a long time. Well, our office was accepted partly because we had personnel that the army found useful like Emmerson who made political contacts with new parties. We helped with the repatriation of diplomats who'd been interned in Japan or caught in Japan, neutral diplomats. We did useful things for the army administration SCAP. [Supreme Commander Allied Powers]

I, of course, was friends with some of the newspaper men. Ed Snow was there and various other people that I'd known in China. I heard in a conversation with one of them--This was fairly early

[341]

J. SERVICE: on. They talked about the problem of the rapidly emerging new publications. It was a very yeasty time in Japan. This was freedom all of a sudden. New magazines were starting. Intellectuals were active. Parties were forming all over the place. These newspaper men were talking about the problems of paper. Some of the Japanese trying to start magazines couldn't get paper. All the paper mills were controlled by the Zaibatsu, the big trusts which we were breaking up.

I had an idea. I wrote a memo which we sent to headquarters pointing out this problem and suggesting controls on newsprint so that new publications would be able to get some--there was short supply anyway--and so that it wasn't all monopolized by the established papers.

Sure enough, without any acknowledgment to POLAD (the Office of the Political Advisor), SCAP did issue an order instructing the Japanese to set up some controls of newsprint so that new publications, democratic publications would have a chance.

Our office also became useful when they set up something called the Allied Council for Japan. We had to give the Russians and the British and the Chinese--actually the Chinese didn't care--a nominal share in the Occupation. It was obvious that we intended to run it ourselves. We were not going to allow any occupation zones by any other powers. But as sort of a front we set up an allied council, on which the Russians had a voice.

The first man that MacArthur delegated for this job was an anti-aircraft general on his staff. His staff was incredible.

LEVENSON: Incredible in what sense?

J. SERVICE: A lot of them were the Bataan gang, people that had been on Bataan, and with him all the way through.

At any rate, they all got promoted. They all got important positions. The anti-aircraft general was MacArthur's deputy in the Allied Council, and he just couldn't handle either the Russians or the very astute Australian that was put on there, MacMahon Ball I think his name was, who did his fair share of needling. After all, MacArthur made it pretty easy to put in a needle occasionally.

In desperation, MacArthur turned to George Atcheson to take over the Allied Council, and George did a much better job. This was the sort of thing that a diplomat should be able to handle. So George became MacArthur's deputy on the Allied Council for Japan, and this made the status of our office.

[342]

LEVENSON: They talked about two emperors in Japan.

J. SERVICE: Well, there was only one that was important! When they met, they met of course at MacArthur's place, not in Hirohito's place.

MacArthur took over the embassy, and we had a lot of hassling about that. His staff did it in an arbitrary way, just moved in when they were getting ready for MacArthur to come. Grew's and other people's effects were stored there, packed and stored. They had unpacked these things to use them to furnish the place without Grew's permission. The offices were taken over as barracks for MacArthur's "Honor Guard."

New Zealand, 1946-1948: An Idyllic Interlude
[Interview 10: October 19, 1977]

LEVENSON: You left Japan and got back to California in September, 1946, right?

J. SERVICE: Picked up the family, had a short vacation and then went out to New Zealand on the ship Monterey. It was a very pleasant voyage. The ship had been semi- reconverted from wartime use. We had triple-decker bunks in our cabin, which was very handy because it gave a lot of place to throw things, nine bunks and only five slept in. Because of our children we had to eat at the first sitting, which was inconvenient, eating at 4:30 p.m.

New Zealand was an idyllic interlude in our life. It was a lovely country, a very friendly and congenial people. It was getting the family together for the first time in six years. We'd had short vacations and leaves, but the period of a few months in Washington in '45 had been hectic, upset of course. So, this was getting acquainted and settling down as a family.

LEVENSON: Did you feel at that point that you were set for a conventional Foreign Service career?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes, quite so. It was getting back into the groove of conventional Foreign Service work. The ambassador, Avra Warren, I think was not, shall we say, overjoyed at my being assigned. He'd expected someone else to come, someone whom he had known, to be his deputy chief of mission, DCM. But, the State Department had to find a spot for me, so the other man got pushed aside.

[343]

J. SERVICE: After a short while I think Warren decided I was okay, that I could be trusted. He was a very active person, who loved hunting, fishing--limitless energy, rushing around the country. He liked to give speeches and talks.

When we got acquainted and he had sized me up, he was quite content to let me run the office. He lived out in the country about forty-five miles from town over a mountain range, narrow, windy road. He came into the office very seldom.

There was one thing that he insisted on, that he have all communication, all direct personal interviews and communications with the prime minister, Peter Fraser. Fraser was also the foreign minister, a nice, avuncular, elderly man, leader of the Labor party, who'd been a preacher in his youth.

In Chungking, Gauss had wanted to have someone along to write the memoranda of conversation, but Warren's tactic was to come charging into my office after one of his meetings with Fraser, walk up and down, and relate the conversation. "I said this," and "he said that." Then Warren would say, "Well, write a telegram," and he'd take off for the country.

He wouldn't see the telegram until the next time he was in town which was several days later. He never objected. He always accepted what I had written. This didn't happen, of course, every day. It was only an occasional thing.

The New Zealand government people were nice to deal with, very congenial. They were just starting in external affairs. They were quite inexperienced, but we could talk very freely and frankly.

A Busy Office: Trade, ANZUS, the Trust Territories

LEVENSON: What was America's policy toward New Zealand?

J. SERVICE: There were a lot of trade problems, mainly New Zealand wishes to ship more lamb and cheese, dairy products into the States, which our farm lobbies were very active in keeping out. We were anxious to export to New Zealand, motor cars and things like that, machinery. They had Imperial Preference, so they were pretty well tied to the United Kingdom. But UK couldn't take all their dairy products, and so they obviously wanted to expand their market.

[344]

J. SERVICE: We were interested in weaning them away from the United Kingdom. They felt themselves to be the most loyal of all the dominions, prided themselves certainly on their loyalty and ties to the homeland. I think our policy was, "Well, this is a new day and age, and we should establish closer ties out in the Pacific."

I was chargé for eight months, between Warren's departure and the next man's appointment.

LEVENSON: Were you then acting ambassador?

J. SERVICE: Yes, for eight months. During that time a young man in the Foreign Office, whom I got to know very well, said to me one day that he thought that New Zealand was beginning to be able to think of the same kind of relationship that we were thinking of. This was something appropriate for a personal letter to the State Department desk officer despatch, because it was given to me very informally.

Later on we got the ANZUS Pact, the Australia-New Zealand-U.S. alliance and security pact in the South Pacific, which isn't as strong now as it was, but it's what we relied on really to pull New Zealand and Australia in to support our own intervention in Vietnam. It came to its full flowering in the Dulles days. I may have had some part in it, telling the American government that there was a possibility of this alliance.

LEVENSON: Did the Antarctic enter into American policy thinking?

J. SERVICE: Not very much. Americans had an expedition down to the South Pole led by Admiral Byrd, B-y-r-d. They came through New Zealand. We put them up. It wasn't a particularly hot topic.

We were also trying in those days to organize the South Pacific Commission to bring in all the Trust Territories and the Trust powers in that area, the French in New Caledonia, Australians in their Trust Territories and so on. That was started during that period.

We also signed one of the first Fulbright agreements with New Zealand while I was there, for exchange of scholars and professors. There was some surplus money from Lend-Lease that was used.

We were trying very hard to purchase some properties for residents' use. It was a fairly busy office, and a very congenial and a good staff. Marshall Green was the junior man in the office at that time. He was just beginning as a Foreign Service officer.

[345]

J. SERVICE: As I mentioned in my speech to the Foreign Service Association, the first chore I had was a report that he had written trying to analyze and predict the forthcoming general elections. Warren handed this to me, fresh off the boat, for me to advise whether or not we should send it in to Washington.

I knew nothing at all about New Zealand politics. Green had done a very systematic and thorough job, quite largely because he had a very good New Zealand woman in the office who was working as a typist-stenographer, in the political section. She really knew New Zealand politics .

Anyway, they predicted Labor would win by four seats, [chuckling] and they won by four seats! [laughter] But Warren almost didn't send it. He didn't want to send it because, as he said, "Everyone I've talked to tells me National is going to win." Of course, his friends were mostly huntin', shootin', fishin', [laughter] and the mayor of Wellington. The various people that he knew, upper crust social people, and so on, were all Nationalists.

But we did send it in, and Marshall Green went on to greater glory. He was quite annoyed though, [chuckling] poor fellow, at my being given the decision about what to do about his report since I was, as I say, completely uninformed and ignorant.

Washington: Promotion to Class II, and Appointment to Foreign Service Selection Board, 1948

J. SERVICE: You asked about whether I thought the future was okay. In April, 1948 I was promoted to class II. I'd been put on a sort of probation, the pro forma punishment that was given me in 1945. Promotion meant that this had been disposed of. A promotion put me in a very conspicuous spot in a way; I was the youngest man in my class, both in age and in years of service. So this was very good news.

Then, in late '48 I was ordered back to Washington for duty on the Foreign Service Selection Board. At that time they had two panels, one for senior grades, one for the junior grades.

I was to serve on the junior panel and then remain in Washington to take charge of an office called Foreign Service Planning, which was the budget and management office of the Foreign Service. The Foreign Service was then quite separate from the departmental service.

[346]

J. SERVICE: In March, '47, the President had set up the loyalty security program officially.

LEVENSON: Now, this is Truman.

J. SERVICE: This is Truman, executive order 9835. Already there were beginning to be rumblings of--I think Whittaker Chambers had already started accusing people, Bentley also, and so on. But, you know, we seemed to be in the clear. The promotion seemed to seal it all, wipe out the past.

LEVENSON: You had your clearances.

J. SERVICE: Yes, except I didn't know about these at the time. There were forms sent out when the executive order was put in. Everyone had to fill out some forms. I've got my memo that I circulated to the office staff, instructing them all to fill out [chuckling] these forms and send them in. In fact I've got my own form. It was completely innocuous, you know.

LEVENSON: So, you were cleared in '46, and '47, and again in '49.

J. SERVICE: That we know of. This is all put together from testimony that State Department people have given in various committees, because appropriations committees almost yearly later on began to ask them for this sort of information. McCarthy made a great deal of, "How many times have you cleared this man?"

The selection board was to meet in early January. As I recall, I flew direct to Washington because I had to stay in Wellington until my successor arrived. Caroline and the family came home by ship, and then I flew home and went direct to Washington. Caroline and the family stayed out here in California. I think the children went to school. I'm not sure, maybe not. Caroline probably has that sort of thing.

The selection board was an arduous, interesting experience.

LEVENSON: How responsible was your work in that?

J. SERVICE: There were five members of the board, four of them Foreign Service, all from diverse backgrounds and experience. We tried in those days to have people who not only represented the various geographical areas, Asia, Africa, South America, Europe, but also the different functions, political, administrative, economic, and so on.

[347]

J. SERVICE: Then there was one outside man who in our case was a man named Gordon Craig, who is a professor of European diplomatic history at Stanford, a very outstanding man. He at that time was at Princeton. He and I shared a room at the Roger Smith Hotel, down on Eighteenth and Pennsylvania.

LEVENSON: What's funny about that? I see you smiling.

J. SERVICE: Oh nothing. I was just remembering. It wasn't a very pleasant experience. [chuckling] There was a pile driver building a new building just outside our window. It was a terrible place to wake up in the morning.

There's no particular relevance here, but we each had to read the dossiers of all the people that we were considering, who were eligible for promotion. We had classes VI, V, and IV, I think. You had to give each person a rating, one for lowest and five for highest.

But you could only apportion your marks according to a certain formula. Only ten percent could be given the highest rating, you see, and ten percent the lowest rating. There were percentages for all of the ratings.

When each person had done this, then we sat down and exchanged our scores. There was to be no discussion of cases until after this stage was reached. If on the basis of the discussion, you had any change of views--then you had to announce to the others the changes you made. If you upped somebody's rating, then it meant you had to lower someone else's rating so your numbers would still fit.

Then we consolidated all the scores. So, we got a ranking of the whole class. The Department would decide how many promotions could be made. Say there were to be twenty-five made. They had to take the top twenty-five people on the list.

They could reject somebody, but if they did reject somebody they couldn't promote anybody with a lower score. Then it went to the Senate and had to be confirmed by the Senate. It was an important and, I think, a very responsible job.

[348]

Questions of Security and "Raping the State Department Files"

LEVENSON: How much did questions of security enter into your deliberations at that point?

J. SERVICE: Oh, they weren't supposed to enter in at all. We were not supposed to be concerned at all with security. This is one of the things that we found. We were fairly early. You see, there was a Foreign Service Act that came in late 1946. We were meeting at the beginning of '49. We were either the second or the third board. I'm not sure. Forty-seven, '48, '49, it must have been the third board.

All sorts of material was put in the dossiers. Some of it was security material. One of the recommendations we made--we made a list with a whole lot of recommendations--was that this material that really should have been security, SY, information should be taken out and given over to SY.

There were various things put in the files, unsubstantiated accusations, nut letters, some just wild accusations. Things like that should be taken out, investigated, and then thrown out or sent to SY.

The stuff was not at all well organized. One of our recommendations was to work out a new format for the dossiers , a four-position folder so that summary material would be together, efficiency reports in one place, and end user reports together, and inspector's reports in their own slot. The plan was adopted, and our dossiers were very much improved and very much cleaned up.

I got many accusations on this later on, which we don't particularly need to have now. One of McCarthy's "loyal underground" claimed the Foreign Service files had been raped. This was mainly this business of cleaning up the files.

The 1946 Foreign Service Act had a new provision for "selection out" from the Foreign Service. There had never been any such provision before, so dead wood could simply accumulate. The new system was modeled after the navy's system, a fairly rigorous selection out. It was not to take effect until three years. We were the first board that actually did any selecting out.

[348a]

Supervisor Tells McCarthy Inquiry Derogatory Matter Was Lifted; Some Marked 'Burn'

Senators Told of Tampering With State Dept. Secret Files

By David McConnell

WASHINGTON. Feb. 4. A State Department file supervisor testified today that confidential and secret documents on Foreign Service personnel were milked of derogatory matter and some material marked "burn" before folders were submitted to department promotion and evaluation panels and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Mrs. Helen B. Balog, supervisor of the department's Foreign Service file room, told a Senate Investigation subcommittee headed by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R., Wis., that John Stewart Service, ousted Foreign Service officer whose loyalty was questioned by the Loyalty Review Board, had day and night access in 1948 and 1949 to the personnel records while he was assigned to a project to revamp the filing system.

She said emphatically, however, that she had no knowledge that it was Mr. Service who had tampered with the folders.

There was much of the bizarre and much of typical governmental bureaucracy in the file supervisor's testimony. She said officials would check out material for as long as eighteen months and that hundreds of Stats Department employees had access to the files.

She was caustic in her denunciation of the filing system and the methods of control over out- going files. She said an authorized person could call for a file but upon its return there was no way to check whether papers had been removed because the contents were neither documented on the jacket nor numbered.

She said under oath that one-

(Continued on page 8, column 2)
(Continued from page one)

New York Herald Tribune February 5, 1953

letter of recommendation signed by Owen Lattimore, Far Eastern expert indicted in December on perjury charges growing out of testimony that he had said he never promoted communism or Communist charges, disappeared from the file of a Foreign Service officer.

An unfavorable report in another Foreign Service officer's file was ordered "burned" in violation of the law, she said. It concerned Melville Osborne, a staff officer and was written from the Guatemala Embassy. Knowing that it is illegal to burn such documents, Mrs. Balog said she took it to Perry Ellis, a Foreign Service officer, who instructed her to leave it with him. Mr. Ellis now is listed as First Secretary of the Embassy in Mexico City.

File Fell on Floor

It was through an F.B.I. agent she testified, that she learned the Lattimore letter of recommendation was missing from the file of Frank Schuler, Foreign Service officer now stationed in Paris. She testified that an FBI agent had asked to review the file and as she was handing it to him it fell and the contents scattered over the floor. While the agent was examining another file, Mrs. Balog reassembled the contents but noticed that the Lattimore letter was missing.

She said she distinctly remembered placing the letter in the Schuler file because at the time it was received she had noticed the Lattimore name and it had impressed her because "he was in the news”.

Sen. McCarthy charged in 1948 that Mr. Lattimore was the "architect" of the nation's Far Eastern policy and accused him of an affinity for Communist causes.

Mrs. Balog also testified that there had been cases where files on former Foreign Service officers were sent to the recruitment section when the employees reapplied for jobs. There, in some cases, she said, the jackets were stripped from the files and they were placed in "new applications for jobs" folders. Such folders are automatically burned after a year if the applicant is rejected, she said.

One such case was that of Vladimir Toumanoff, whom Sen. McCarthy identified as a Russian-born naturalized citizen assigned to the department's recruitment division. The Senator said Mr. Toumanoff would be the lead-off witness in tomorrow's continuation of the investigation.

Jessup's Name Comes Up

The name of Philip C. Jessup who recently resigned as an ambassador-at-large also entered the testimony when Mrs. Balog testified that his file had been kept out for more than a year, and when she attempted to locate it the staff worked for two hours tracing it down. She said it had been charged to the department's legal adviser but turned up in the office of Robert Ryan, assistant chief of the Foreign Service personnel bureau. She said Mr. Ryan frequently withdrew files.

Mrs. Balog said it was not until last year that she learned that when files were sent to the performance division, all derogatory material was removed and placed in a file there. Until then, she said, she assumed all the information was in files under her custody, and it was not until 1952 that she began advising F.B.I. agents, to "go upstairs" to see if there was further information on persons they were checking.

Case of Service

Mr. Service was arrested in 1945 in the "Amerasia" case, which involved charges of unauthorized possession or transmittal of government documents. He was cleared by a Federal grand jury the same year. The case developed when Federal agents raided the offices of the magazine "Amerasia" and found many documents marked confidential and secret.

In view of his connection with the "Amerasia" case, Sen. Charles B. Potter, R, Mich., said that his file revision project was like "putting an arsonist in charge of a match factory."

Sen. McCarthy commented when recessing the hearing that his subcommittee would want to find out who ordered the burning of the "derogatory letter" described by Mrs. Balog. He said this was "clearly an illegal act."

[349]

J. SERVICE: We had a hard time in considering some of the junior officers. If they were unlucky and got one bad report--they might have served only in one post, or had one chief who was unsympathetic or a low grader--they might be given a low rating and forced out.

The selection out time was very limited, very short, for the lowest class. It was regarded as probation, something like either two years or three years. If you're not promoted you were given the heave-ho. We recommended some changes there.

There was also the question of people who had come in during the war. There was the Manpower Act which enabled people to be brought into the Foreign Service auxiliary, and then they were brought into the Foreign Service laterally without beginning at the bottom and the usual type of examination.

The question was whether or not they would be promoted. We were the first board to promote any. We had quite a lot of dissension inside the board on that policy, but our precepts, our instructions, required us to not discriminate against these people.

My brother was in one of the classes that we were considering, so I withdrew from the panel while his case was under discussion.

LEVENSON: Your brother Dick?

J. SERVICE: Yes. But, I had to put in a score for him, because otherwise it wouldn't have added up right!

LEVENSON: Did he get promoted?

J. SERVICE: Yes, he did get promoted. The head of that board is living here in Berkeley now, a man named [Donald B] Heath who lives down here, old and rather failing now. We had many arguments I'm afraid.

Anyway, it was a very exhausting job.

The Scripps-Howard Press Blasts Service's Appointment to Selection Board

J. SERVICE: Very soon after the board met, the Scripps-Howard papers got news of my being on the board and came out with a great blast that Service, that Amerasia character, was sitting on a board that was

[350]

J. SERVICE: deciding all Foreign Service promotions and assignments. It was a very exaggerated type of thing, sensational. All this sort of stuff is in the clippings files.

I went to the administrative people and said, "Do you want me to retire from the board?" I was perfectly willing to do it. "Absolutely not! Scripps-Howard is not dictating who serves our selection boards," et cetera, et cetera. So, I carried on.

The Department was very brave about my staying on the board, but they obviously were worried. So, my assignment to the Division of Foreign Service Planning was changed. They felt it better to find an invisible job for me.

LEVENSON: Just one minute. How did Scripps-Howard find out that you were on that board? In the university this sort of committee is very, very confidential.

J. SERVICE: I just don't know. I don't know how it got out. Gossip, Washington is full of it. But membership of the Selection Board was not secret. There always have been superpatriots, and the State Department had its share, generally down in the clerical levels. These are the people that became McCarthy's quote, "loyal American underground."

There were some of them in personnel whom we later were able to spot. So, I would guess that that was how it got to Scripps-Howard.

Scripps-Howard had always been very fierce on the Amerasia case. They were the most violent in 1945. Gayn had a suit against Scripps-Howard and one of their specialty writers, who made a sort of a career out of the Amerasia case, a man named Frederick Woltman, W-o-l-t-m-a-n. It may have been Woltman who picked it up. I've forgotten.

An Invisible Job: Special Assistant to the Chief of Foreign Service Personnel

J. SERVICE: Then I was given sort of a back room job called Special Assistant to the Chief of Foreign Service Personnel, which meant that I was available for anything he wanted--special assignments. Primarily my job was to be the person to tell Foreign Service officers coming in from the field what was in their dossier.

[351]

J. SERVICE: Foreign Service efficiency files were confidential in those days. But there had to be some way of answering people--You know, "Why didn't I get promoted? What was wrong? What did my chiefs criticize?" So, I was the Foreign Service wailing wall. Now it's become a much more bureaucratized establishment, a regular counseling service, three or four people. But the service was small in those days, [chuckling] and I did it all.

Also I worked with the unit that took care of the selection boards, the writing of precepts for the next board, selecting the people to serve on the board.

I instituted one thing which apparently aroused a lot of antipathy in the Foreign Service among senior people. People had very individual standards. Some people would never give an "excellent" because excellent is perfect. Some people gave practically everybody excellent .

I suggested that we simply supply the selection board with a breakdown of each rating officer's ratings. This man, for instance, rated eight officers. One was excellent, three very good, four good, and so on.

LEVENSON: You said this proposal aroused the anger of some of the senior people.

J. SERVICE: Yes, for reasons which I've never really understood. I don't know quite why they were so angry--felt that this was an invasion of their privacy or showing them up, I don't know.

Efficiency reports were extremely important. The selection boards had to rely on them very heavily. Inspectors' reports were perhaps even more important, but your superiors' reports were very important.

When the service was still small, you could have some idea of a chief, whether he was a tough chief or whether he was an easy chief. But the service was beginning, at this time, to grow rapidly. So it seemed to me a very logical thing to provide this information on rating habits. It wasn't derogatory at all.

There was one man in Belgium that was very hard on junior officers. He was the old line, diplomatic person, very fussy apparently. So the junior officers never got a good rating. Junior officers, because they had such a short period in that lowest class, could lose their whole career, could be fired on the basis of his rating alone.

[352]

J. SERVICE: One of the things we did was to change the regulations so that no one could be selected out from the junior grade until he had served in two posts and had ratings from two different officers.

Changing Character of the Foreign Service: Some Difficulties for the New People

LEVENSON: Did you notice any difficulties for what one could loosely call new people? I know that the Foreign Service, at least the China section in the '30s somehow got atypical people, Midwesterners, non-Eastern establishment, et cetera, people like yourself with slightly atypical backgrounds. After the war, as I understand it, many more "atypical" people came in, Jews, people who hadn't been to private schools, and so on. Was this beginning to present any sort of problem with the old hands?

J. SERVICE: I don't think on any overall basis. In certain instances, like this one I just mentioned, this man in Belgium. He obviously belonged to the old-school-tie group.

You know, Grew represented the old Ivy League tradition, socialite, wealthy background. He was involved in a historic furor in 1924 when the consular people were consolidated with the diplomatic service. Up to that time they had been separate. Consular people were second class citizens.

Apparently, the committee that carried out the consolidation was dominated by people, of whom Grew was one, who discriminated against the poor consuls, and there was a big hullabaloo about that.

We had some of this after the war, but I don't think it was so much on the old Ivy League, socialite basis. It was against the people who were brought in on a special non-examination basis during the war.

Also after the war there were special examinations given, much less rigorous, for entry into the Foreign Service. A lot of people from the armed services came in. Many of them had excellent backgrounds, and were very capable people.

But the old line Foreign Service felt that this was coming in the back door. They hadn't really worked up from the bottom. This was the hassle I was talking about on the selection board, as to whether some of these people should be promoted.

[353]

The China White Paper: A State Department Boomerang

J. SERVICE: Meanwhile though, I think before we take off for India, I've got to talk about the White Paper, the China White Paper. In hindsight it's remarkable that intelligent and experienced men in the Department, people like Dean Acheson and so on, had so little realization of what a hot topic China was. They should have known, because China had been a hot topic since '45, and all through the Chinese civil war--the civil war had been going on--the Department had been under tremendous pressure.

Before Truman was elected [1948], and then particularly after Truman was elected, he was bitterly attacked. The critics charged, "We're letting China go down the drain."

By the summer of '49, it was apparent that [Kuomintang] China was finished. All through the civil war we had abstained from anything which could be interpreted as being critical of the central government, Chiang Kai-shek. We couldn't appear to push him out of China.

By the summer of '49, the administration had had enough of criticism. They were going to counterattack and defend themselves, prove that they had done everything they could to support Chiang, that it was not our fault that the Communists were winning. It was Chiang's own failings.

The administration decided to put out a White Paper, but they didn't foresee what the effect was going to be, how this would really boomerang, which it did.

My selection board work was finished, and Caroline and I came out to California and had some vacation.

John Davies was then serving in the Department on the first policy planning staff with George Kennan, when it really meant something, under Acheson.

John called me and said that it had been decided to add an annex to the White Paper, summarizing the views of some of us in the [China] field who had predicted what was going to happen.

Apparently the State Department wanted to have it both ways. First it hadn't done anything to push Chiang Kai-shek, and also it wasn't so stupid that it didn't know what was going on. So they decided to put in some of our field reports.

[354]

J. SERVICE: John wanted to know if I could get back to Washington and help write this annex, since we presumably knew our own reports better than anyone else. We drove rather hurriedly across the country, eliminating some of the visits we were going to make.

In Humboldt, Tennessee, on a hot Sunday afternoon we were driving down the main street of the town, and some black kids in a car coming from a side street ran right into the side of our car. It wasn't badly damaged, but had to be left there to be fixed up. I got on a train and went to Washington where I put together annex 47 of the White Paper, which is reports of officers in the field. [shows book, pp. 564-576] (United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949 (Department of State Publication 3573, August 1949).

LEVENSON: Thank you.

J. SERVICE: I would have been happier, maybe, if we had put in some whole reports. After discussion we decided to do it by subject: Soviet intentions, Chinese Communist background, Kuomintang disintegration, and so on.

These are all excerpts from reports that we wrote. It was accepted without change, as I recall, and was incorporated in the White Paper.

At this time, oddly enough, I was also shown a draft of Acheson's long letter of transmittal. It's really an introduction to the book. It's got Dean Acheson's name on it, but the first draft was done by a man named John Melby who had been in China after I was--he came in after I did--whom I knew quite well, who was later fired, primarily because he was the editor of this White Paper, I think. The pretext was different, but I think this was the real reason.

At any rate, I suggested that they had been unduly critical of the national government during the Kuomintang decade, '27 to '37, and I suggested that they had done some constructive things. I suggested some revisions that actually improved Chiang Kai-shek's image.

LEVENSON: It's a formidable volume.

J. SERVICE: Oh yes.

[355]

LEVENSON: Over a thousand pages.

J. SERVICE: It was sensational, of course. It came out in the fall of '49. It was bitterly attacked by [Representative Walter H. ] Judd and the China Lobby. It couldn't avoid criticism because it couldn't be the whole record. As big as it is, it had to omit a good deal.

I was critical of it in my Amerasia Papers because, of course, it had to protect the State Department's face in a sense. Thus it doesn't indicate that the State Department agreed with our February 26 [1945] telegram from Chungking. It prints the message, but not until later, twenty years later or more, was it revealed that the Department had sent it to the White House with commendation and support. But, perhaps that was too much to expect.

Gauss Predicts Danger for Foreign Service Officers Identified as Despatch Writers

LEVENSON: In hindsight what could have been done to protect the Department and Foreign Service officers?

J. SERVICE: In hindsight--Gauss was the only smart man. Gauss said to me that we made a great mistake in letting our reports be in there. [chuckling] Of course we were pleased. You know, we thought this was fine. We even thought it was good to have it on the record, to prove we were right.

But Gauss said it was a great mistake to put people in the limelight in this way by having the authorship of reports identified. He was absolutely right. This gave information and ammunition for the attacks on us. This was all used later on. It proved to a lot of people that we were the villains.

What could the State Department have done? Well, it's hard to say. [pause] I don't think that it was necessarily the wrong thing to do. The character of public opinion and the nature of the issue was something that probably couldn't be predicted, even by a wise man. I don't know if that should have stopped an attempt to clear the record.

The editors had to make some difficult decisions. They eliminated the Wedemeyer report because it recommended a trusteeship for Manchuria. This proposal would annoy and hurt

[356]

J. SERVICE: the Chinese. But this allowed the report to become a mystery. Many people assumed the Wedemeyer report had recommended more aid to China, which it really didn't. The mistake was being unduly worried about the susceptibilities of the Chinese.

Maybe they should have had it done by outside people. Maybe they should have turned the material over to scholars earlier. They did eventually. They asked Feis to come in. Feis wrote a book, a privileged book, China Tangle (Herbert Feis, The China Tangle: the American Effort in China from Pearl Harbor to the Marshall Mission, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1953), but that was several years later. Perhaps outside people could have seemed a bit more convincing than people who obviously had a self-serving interest, as every government has--it's fairly common.

LEVENSON: There's one more question before we leave the China White Paper. Had it been made clear to you at this point or had you yourself arrived at a conclusion that because of Amerasia and because of the Communist victory in China, that you were not likely to have any further Foreign Service career associated with the Far East?

J. SERVICE: No. I was assigned to India, after all. No, I didn't expect to be finished in the Far East, particularly with the Kuomintang government having lost.

LEVENSON: How much active interest were you able to take in FE?

J. SERVICE: Oh, I didn't try to. I thought it was much better for my friends in FE for me to stay away. We still had good friends, but it was all personal.

I did have some discussions at this time on a personal basis--about Vietnam, because this was the beginning of our involvement in Vietnam, '49, whether we should supply the French. This was with a young man I had worked with in 1945.

He was a young man going out to Saigon. We had several talks. I thought it was a hopeless cause. He disagreed with me. His background was all European.

Then a younger friend of mine who had served in Chungking--not a China service officer, but an EUR man--was very anxious for me to talk to some of the people from the European area, French types, who were very anxious for us to support the French in Indochina.

[357]

J. SERVICE: They took the line, of course, that France was all-important, and this is what Acheson says in Present at the Creation. It was essential that we support the French in Indochina because we needed French support for our policies in Europe.

FE generally was anti-colonial, trying to end colonialism, and anti our involvement in Vietnam. A little later Melby, whom I mentioned, went out on a survey trip with some Pentagon types, and he recommended the same thing. But FE lost. The EUR was all-powerful in the Department at that time.

When Congress met in early January [1950], there was a leak to the press that some sort of a circular had been sent to posts in the Far East anticipating the fall of Taiwan to the Communists.

LEVENSON: The fall of Taiwan?

J. SERVICE: Yes. The mainland had fallen, and Chiang had fled to Taiwan, but he didn't have much to fight with. The National Security Council had decided that we had no strategic interest in holding Taiwan. We would give economic, but no military aid, to Chiang Kai-shek.

Some sort of a circular had been sent out, guidance for information purposes, that we were to minimize, not to maximize, the probable loss of Taiwan. It was not to be regarded as a disaster for American interests. Knowland, who was known as "the senator from Formosa," jumped on it, and demanded to know who drafted it, was it Davies or was it Service?

Then McCarthy jumped in the Senate and said, "Oh well, Service is the same man that was arrested in the Amerasia case." Judd made similar noises in the House. There was a great furor for several days. The State Department refused to reveal who had drafted this memorandum. It had been approved, of course, by high people.

LEVENSON: Was it you?

J. SERVICE: No, of course not. I had nothing to do, as I've been saying, with anything in FE.

A Friendly Chat with Senator Knowland

J. SERVICE: So, I said, "I'll go call on Knowland because after all, he's my senator." The State Department congressional relations people said okay. Then I said, "How about calling on McCarthy?" The

[358]

J. SERVICE: congressional relations people said, "Don't touch McCarthy. He's dangerous. He's bad business."

So, I went around to see Knowland, and we had a friendly chat. I assured him personally that I had nothing whatever to do with any Far Eastern matters for quite some time, and didn't draft this circular.

We talked about coalition governments. There had been Communist members of governments in Western Europe. Coalition governments hadn't meant the end of the world. We had been simply trying to prevent a disaster in China, the disaster that had now come about.

He didn't agree with me completely, but admitted some logic in my position and that it wasn't necessarily disloyal. Then, I told him about winning the Oakland Tribune marathon around Lake Merritt in 1932. That surprised him! [laughter]

LEVENSON: What was the atmosphere of the meeting?

J. SERVICE: Very friendly toward the end, rather stiff and bristly at the beginning. By the time we ended, he was quite cordial, and he always was after that. He never attacked me after that. When I was working in New York for SARCO--our offices for a while were in the same building where the UN mission offices were--we met a couple of times in the elevator. He knew he knew me. So, I spoke to him one day and reminded him who I was, and he seemed pleased to meet me.

Posting to India

J. SERVICE: The Department was concerned, going back to my job, was concerned about my being a problem to the State Department, particularly in Congress. I remember I was introduced to a congressman named Karl Stefan from Nebraska.

Apparently there were considerable efforts--sort of missionary work being done in the appropriation committees to try to convince them that I was not the dangerous character that Scripps-Howard had been writing about. Stefan invited me up to lunch on the Hill, very pleasant. He agreed that I was a fine fellow and had me to lunch there in the House of Representatives dining room up in the Capitol--introduced me to a few of his colleagues. He did feel it had been a mistake to have put me in such a conspicuous place as the selection board. This was the general attitude of the Department.

[359]

J. SERVICE: Dean Rusk, for instance, apparently felt very agitated that I'd been put in such a visible spot. He felt it was better to get me out of the Department--out of the country. It was decided to send me to India. I was assigned to Calcutta in November, 1949.

Just before we left Washington--this was January, 1950; actually January 25, 1950-- [Alger] Hiss was found guilty in the second trial. I said to Caroline at the time that this could be very bad news. It seemed very threatening. But, that's about the only recollection I have of any real premonition of trouble.

I had to finish up things in the Department. I'm not sure when I started consultation, but it was fairly late. We were in Washington, as I recall, through January [1950]. I don't think we left Washington until the beginning of February.

[360]

XI THE FIRING

McCarthy Opens Campaign Against "Communists in the State Department." Names John Stewart Service

J. SERVICE: We came out on leave in California, and then McCarthy started his speeches around Lincoln's birthday, early February, Wheeling, West Virginia. All sorts of numbers, 207, 257, 81, 57, and so on.

LEVENSON: Numbers of what?

J. SERVICE: Of people employed in the State Department who were Communists or pro-Communist

LEVENSON: Or traitors.

J. SERVICE: Or traitors, security risks, and so on, all sorts of things. Perverts were apt to get thrown in too at that time.

LEVENSON: Perverts then meaning--?

J. SERVICE: Homosexuals, but they were usually called some such name, you know.

I assumed, of course, that I would be in the list. McCarthy had already attacked me on the floor of the Senate. So I went every day down to the Berkeley Public Library to see the New York Times. Senators challenged McCarthy: he couldn't just indulge in this sort of wild, random accusations. They wanted some evidence.

He said to protect the rights of people, he wouldn't give any names, but he would give some details. Then he went through eighty-one cases that he said were the real substance, the core of his accusations.

[361]

J. SERVICE: None of these eighty-one cases fitted me. I called up the State Department, called the chief of Foreign Service personnel, my old boss, the man I'd been working for. I said, "Well, what do I do? Here I am. Do I go to India or not?"

He says, [loudly] "You're not on the list. Go! Take off!" --the intimation being the sooner the better. [laughter]

We were going by freighter from Seattle. As Caroline has probably said, we were in the mid-Pacific, going the great circle route from Seattle to Yokohama on our way to India. The freighter had twelve passengers. We all got friendly with the officers.

We got to know the radio operator. He had taken our son Bob, who was about thirteen at this time, up to his radio shack and the purser had given Bob a job doing this or that.

The radio operator one night at supper said, "Say, is your name John Stewart Service?" I said, "Yes." He said, "There's been a lot of stuff about you on the radio news, talking a lot about you in Washington." This was the first intimation we had. We went up and heard a news broadcast over his radio.

A day or two later I got a telegram from the Department saying I should return because of charges by Senator McCarthy. The family could either remain in Japan or go on to India.

We decided they should go on to India. We expected that there would be a hearing. We knew from the radio broadcast that a Senate committee had been set up--but something that shouldn't take long. So Caroline went on to India to get the children in school and get settled. I flew back from Yokohama.

LEVENSON: How did you feel at this point?

J. SERVICE: Oh, hell. We were not well informed. We didn't really know what was happening. The news broadcasts were very sketchy. Certainly annoyed, uncertain of course, about what was going on, but not particularly concerned. After all, I d been through the Amerasia case and gotten a unanimous clean bill.

[362]

Frantic Press Conferences. "I Welcome This Chance to Have an Investigation. I Have Nothing to Hide"

J. SERVICE: I wasn't prepared for the tremendous hullabaloo. But every place the plane stopped, the press were after me. I evaded them once by simply staying on the plane.

LEVENSON: Were they hostile?

J. SERVICE: Oh no. Well, not really hostile. They were just sort of pressing, and asking the same foolish questions. "How do you feel?"

LEVENSON: [laughter] Sorry.

J. SERVICE: You keep saying, "I welcome this chance to have an investigation to clear the air. I have nothing to hide." You keep saying the same thing. And yet they pursue this at every single stop.

What surprised me was the friendliness of the people on the plane.

LEVENSON: A regular commercial plane?

J. SERVICE: Yes, Northwest Airlines. When we got off in Seattle, they all gave me a friendly hand clap. This was true all the way through. With one or two exceptions, you always have friendship from people that know you, even on just a sitting beside you in an airplane basis, or tradespeople, liquor store clerks you deal with--Anytime anybody has any sort of personal relationship with you, they don't believe any of this garbage at all. They're very friendly and sympathetic.

LEVENSON: What conclusions do you draw from that, Jack?

J. SERVICE: You read about somebody in the paper, it's somebody far away. There's no intimacy or humanity. He's just a sort of cipher. You can believe something about somebody like that. But if you actually live next door to a person or see him, why, what you read in the papers doesn't seem to affect you.

The Department Turns Out in Force to Meet Jack's Plane

J. SERVICE: The Department went all out. The Department's policy was obviously to meet McCarthy head on. A big welcome was planned for me. I don't know how much planning. But, word went around, "Go out and meet Service."

[363]

J. SERVICE: The chief of personnel was out there. A lot of people I'd worked with in the Department the year before were there. Some friends in the Foreign Service were there. I think Marshall Green was there; I forget.

I came into the Department--[John E.] Peurifoy, who was the administrative head of the Department, the deputy assistant secretary for administration, or whatever the title is, he greeted me.

There was a Foreign Service lunch on--The Foreign Service Association had monthly luncheons at that time. I wasn't planning to go. I was busy with other things, and I thought it might be an embarrassment for me to go. Donald Smith and various other people insisted I go. At the lunch I was introduced by the president of the association, who merely said, "We know nothing about Service's case, but he's got friends."

They gave me a big clap, a rising clap. McCarthy soon found out about this and made a big thing about it in the press--Foreign Service Association members had been ordered to give Service an ovation, and so on.

I don't remember any particular accusation over Department officers meeting me; but the fact that I was given facilities and help by the Department was later criticized in the press. There was sharp criticism of any official help or assistance as favoring the accused.

"You've Got to Have a Lawyer"

J. SERVICE: Peurifoy said, "You've got to have a lawyer."

I said, "I don't want a lawyer." I'd been stuck for two thousand dollars by this man in '45 who really didn't do anything. He just turned out to be sort of a front man. "Why do I have to have a lawyer?"

He said, "This is serious business. You've got to have a lawyer."

I tried various people. One was an old friend, Joe Rauh, R-a-u-h, who had been a neighbor of ours. His son had been a very good friend of Bob's. But he was already tied up with the Remington case.

[364]

J. SERVICE: Somebody said, "Go talk to Arnold, Fortas, and Porter." I went and talked to Abe Fortas, who later was Supreme Court judge. But he was representing Lattimore. Almost everybody was already getting involved.

Peurifoy said, "Talk to the legal adviser." His name was Fisher, Adrian S. Fisher--"Butch" Fisher. He was very helpful. He canvassed a lot of possibilities, and then finally he came up with a firm that he knew quite well, Reilly, Rhetts and Ruckelshaus.

Reilly was an older man, quite conservative. They were actually labor lawyers. Reilly, the older man, was a very good friend of Senator Taft and of some of the Republicans in the Senate, conservative people.

The younger man, Rhetts--Harvard Law School, had come to Washington in New Deal days, and had a reputation for being a very thorough, meticulous type of lawyer--which we, it was obvious by this time, were going to need.

They agreed to see me and I went to their office. Ed and I liked each other as soon as we saw each other. They said, "Sit down and tell us about yourself." They wanted to know pretty much every- thing. Ed was, as I say, a very thorough guy. We had a long talk. Then: "We'll call you tomorrow."

The next day they called and said okay, they would take me. No fee, but they would be happy if I could cover overhead costs. A lawyer has to have an office and hire secretaries and so on. We went ahead on that basis. We also agreed that I would not "take refuge" in the Fifth Amendment.

Ed then devoted full time for months and months and months, pretty much full time, on this case. Occasionally he had to break off because he also had a practice to do. He really, as he got into the case and found out how much it involved, had to devote most of his time to it.

LEVENSON: At that preliminary meeting was it a sort of adversary discussion to try to probe any possible weak points in your story?

J. SERVICE: Oh, yes. He said, "I expect you to be perfectly honest and frank." It was adversary in the sense of being probing, yes--not antagonistic. But you expect a lawyer to really want to know the truth about the case. I didn't resent that at all.

[365]

J. SERVICE: We became very close friends, so much so that when they went to Europe a year or two later, we were designated guardians of their children in case anything should happen to them.

Lauchlin Currie Refuses to Testify

J. SERVICE: The first thing that we did was to go and talk to [Lauchlin] Currie. Currie had left the government. He'd been accused by Bentley of being in some sort of a Communist cell that Bentley had had contact with. Currie denied the charges, and no further effort was made to investigate him.

Of course, Bentley had made charges against a good many people, some of them probably with some basis; others, doubtful basis.

At any rate, Currie was then working for, I think, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He rather surprised us by saying that he was very sorry, but he felt that we just shouldn't call on him. He wouldn't be able to be of any help. I've forgotten all the rationale, but it wouldn't do our case any good, and by inference it wouldn't do him any good perhaps. I don't know.

This really meant that we had to fall back, shall we say. We couldn't bring him in to testify about his involvement in things like talking to the press, the sort of non-bureaucratic way in which I was functioning in the period leading up to the Amerasia arrest.

LEVENSON: How did you take that?

J. SERVICE: Disappointed. But in any case, Lattimore's wild-swinging attack on McCarthy hadn't gone over very well. He really got down and slugged it out with McCarthy. He called McCarthy as many names as McCarthy called him. This didn't sit very well with the Senate.

We were thinking at that time of the Senate as being the more important forum really.

LEVENSON: More important than--?

J. SERVICE: The State Department's Loyalty Security Board.

[365a]

Speech of Senator Joe McCarthy
Wisconsin Retail Food Dealers Association
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
August 6, 1950

Then we come to John Stewart Service. Service was arrested by the FBI in connection with the theft of hundreds of secret government documents. The FBI testified they had microphones in the hotel room of Jaffe, whom they labeled as a Communist, when Service visited him. The microphone recording showed that Service discussed military secrets with this Communist while the war was still on. Service admitted having turned over to him classified State Department documents. At the time Service and his five co-defendants were arrested, J. Edgar Hoover, according to a Washington paper said, "This is a 100 percent air-tight case of espionage." But Service did not go to jail. However, Under-Secretary of State Joseph Grew who insisted he be prosecuted, left the Department. Acheson took over and service (sic) was re-hired, promoted and put in charge of placing personnel in the Far East area.

The Tydings-McMahon Committee said he was a bit indiscreet, but that it was oh so unfair to expose him.

[366]

Two Board Levels: The State Department' s Loyalty Security Board Under the Civil Service Commission' s Loyalty Review Board

J. SERVICE: One thing I might as well explain now--was that there were two levels of boards. Each department under the loyalty security program had its own board which was called the Loyalty Security Board. Then up above, set up by the president, nominally under the Civil Service Commission, there was something called the Loyalty Review Board.

The Loyalty Review Board had the authority to review all cases to enforce uniformity of standards. They interpreted the executive order as giving them the right to call up and hear or reverse lower courts' cases that were decided in favor of the employee. In any case, no one objected to their having the right to supervise.

All cases were decided by the department boards and then went up to them for this review process --usually called "post audit." My case had numerous clearances by State Department boards and had been sent up to the review board.

The review board--this was apparently at the beginning of 1950, early 1950--had decided since I had never been called for a hearing, since I'd never been presented any interrogatories or given any sort of charges or accusations or asked any questions, that my case should be sent back to the State Department board for them to hold a hearing and ask me to appear.

McCarthy had a spy--I mean a "loyal American underground"--in the Loyalty Review Board staff. So, he got this news before the State Department did. His accusations against me were based on this leak from the Loyalty Review Board, that my case had been remanded back to the State Department board--for hearings. This was what took everyone by surprise because the State Department didn't even know it when McCarthy did.

Anyway we expected the State Department to be detailed and difficult. But we thought of the Tydings committee which had been set up by this time, a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to hear McCarthy's accusations and charges, as being the principal forum, because of its public importance.

Lattimore's tactics had offended really some of the people who were inclined to support him simply because he had been so extreme and violent. It wasn't a dignified way to act. We decided it would be better tactics to be low key, to admit some

[367]

J. SERVICE: blame. It was obvious that I had behaved in an abnormal fashion. We couldn't explain in detail why I had. We had to admit some indiscretion. That was generally our policy. So that, the Currie business was not an overwhelming disaster. [tape off]

LEVENSON: As it happened by fluke, I was present at the Lattimore hearings. What makes you say that Lattimore's approach was a disaster?

J. SERVICE: I think this may have been a subjective judgment by my lawyers. I may have overstated it, but they were in contact with all sorts of people. As I mentioned, Reilly was a friend of some of the senior, older senators. He may have gotten it from them. They were always in contact with a lot of other lawyers who were following these things very closely.

I think the general feeling was that Lattimore might have helped himself if he hadn't been quite so combative. He overdid it. Certainly I couldn't have played that same kind of role. I'm just not the kind of person. Also, I was a government employee. Lattimore was not. He was a private citizen, had been outrageously attacked, and had a right to be outraged.

But, we just felt that it wasn't good tactics for me to try to do a Lattimore. A little more dignified, a little more calm approach seemed to us to probably be more likely to bring along the people in the Senate that we wanted to bring along.

Letter of Charges: On Salary, with Office Space and a Stenographer

J. SERVICE: The Department was very helpful. The board gave us a letter of charges. Do you want it?

LEVENSON: Yes, I think so.

J. SERVICE: You want to turn that off till I find it here? [tape off]

LEVENSON: Thanks, I have it, March 24, 1950 (See Appendix III).

J. SERVICE: The letter of charges is not very specific, but the basic charges are there. They didn't go into detail, and they said in effect to simply answer everything derogatory that had been said about

[367a]

Excerpt of remarks of Herve J. L Houreux, Chairman of the Committee, Foreign Service Association, while presiding at its monthly luncheon March 29, 1950:

"I hope you have enjoyed your lunch. There is one thing we have today that is different--Service! Yes we have Service. By this I mean John Service, who has just arrived from the Far East." (The audience applauded for more than two minutes, before the speaker could proceed). "John Service is a fellow--Foreign Service Officer. He is a colleague. He is one of us. He is a member of our Association. As such, he is a 'fraternity brother' and, as a fraternity brother, he is entitled to our affection, to our esteem, to our confidence, to our best wishes.

"I do not know whether John Service is guilty of the charges that have been made. I have not seen his record. I do not know precisely what charges have been levied. But I will say this: Until such time as the charges have been proven by a court or other body of competent jurisdiction, he is innocent. He is entitled to our respect, to our support, to our assistance. As John Service goes forth to meet one of the greatest challenges of his entire career, let us, his 'fraternity brothers', express to him our every good wish; let us pray that his cause may be righteous, that he may be given facility of expression, strength and courage to wage his defense successfully, and that the cloud that tends to despoil his honor may soon be dissipated." (At this point, the audience rose and gave John Service a tremendous applause that had in it warmth of feeling and of friendliness). Mr. L'Heureux continued:

“I just wish to say one more thing! As a body, our Foreign Service has been pretty free of scandal. We need not bow our head in shame. We are not infallible. We are human. But, man for man, I am prepared to match our foreign Service with any organization, with any group--on the hill or in the valleys--in intelligence, ability, judgment, integrity, devotion to duty, patriotism, morals and loyalty!”

(signed) Harve J. L'Heureux

[368]

J. SERVICE: me, everything that I knew about, everything that appeared in the papers, that they wanted to clean the slate once and for all, and do an exhaustive job.

The Department gave me office space in the offices of the Foreign Service inspectors, because most of their people are away. They only come in twice a year for consultations, so there was desk space there. There was a Foreign Service clerk-stenographer, a woman clerk who was on leave and in Washington temporarily. She was assigned to me. So I had help and facilities.

They were fairly cooperative in trying to get me files. I, of course, wanted to have my own despatches. It's hard to run them down and locate them, but they found a lot, which later on we had George Kennan read as a witness for the board and evaluate.

George Kennan reviewed all the reports of mine that we could find. He's got comments on a lot of them which--start at page 2481 in this Part 2 (In Tyding Committee Report op cit). They don't appear right in the transcript, but appear separately for some reason.

LEVENSON: Were you on salary at this time?

J. SERVICE: Yes, I was kept on salary. We kept putting off the hearing because we found we had a lot of work to do. We finally started about May 26 [1951]. Actually I got back to Washington at the end of March. Ed Rhetts started working just about April 1. By May 26 we started hearings.

LEVENSON: I've seen some of the documentation and it seems to me the most extraordinary job that you got all that material together in such a short time. What sort of work schedule did you have on this?

J. SERVICE: [chuckling] Oh well, there wasn't any work schedule. We worked just as long as we could, you know.

We may want to put in the record the citation. I don't know. The transcript was eventually given to the Tydings committee, and then it was printed by the Tydings committee. A report of the transcript of my hearings appears in part 2 of the Tydings committee report. State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation, Part 2, pp. 1958-2509.

[369]

State Department Loyalty Security Board Hearings

J. SERVICE: There were hearings before the State Department board, not every day, but almost every day, from May 26 to June 24, sometimes fairly long, some days not so long, depending on the board members' available time. They were, of course, all people with other jobs to do.

The head was Brigadier General Conrad Snow, a man named Theodore Achilles, and [Arthur G. ] Stevens. Stevens and Achilles were both from the EUR division of the Department, so they had no connection with me in the past, no connection with my work. It was thought desirable, of course, to not have people from the Far East.

I won't go into the details here. We asked for Hurley to appear, but Hurley declined. He would have had to agree to cross-examination by my attorney if he had appeared, and he didn't want to do that obviously.

LEVENSON: Were you under oath?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes, certainly. It was all semi-judicial. You're under oath and a transcript is taken. The witnesses were all under oath, and evidence has got to be by oath or affidavit.

LEVENSON: Did you ask Bishop to appear?

J. SERVICE: We asked the board to ask Bishop to appear, and word came back that he didn't think he had any information additional to what he'd already given. So he would not appear, in other words. There was no way to force him to appear.

LEVENSON: Were there others whom you asked who did not appear?

J. SERVICE: I asked for affidavits or testimony from a couple of people--they were army--who'd known me in China or in Japan, and they declined. But I didn't particularly hold that against them. They were army officers, and they were concerned, obviously, about what it might involve them in.

Other people, General [Frank] Dorn, who'd been Stilwell's closest friend and subordinate in China, and Joe Dickey who had been head of G-2 and people like that appeared without any hesitation, testified very fully. My former chiefs, [Ambassadors] Nelson, Johnson, and Gauss appeared.

[370]

FBI Interviewing Methods

J. SERVICE: Gauss' testimony was interesting in one way, for showing us what happens in your FBI interviews. Hundreds of people were interviewed by the FBI. There are always two of them. They talk to you, and then they write their own notes down.

What eventually comes back may be quite different from what the person said, because it's a selective process of what they want to put down in the notes. Then even that is probably selected again for writing up their report. In other words, they're not looking for good things; they're looking for bad things. Gauss was able to counteract some of the things that the FBI credited him with having said, but this was a problem in this whole process of interviews by FBI people.

At one point when they were talking to me, I tried to have a secretary in the room, and they wouldn't talk with a secretary present. I wanted her to take notes. I said, "Well, you're taking notes. Why can't my secretary take notes?" They said, "Sorry, but we won't talk to you on that basis." So, you're always alone, and there are two of them. You don't know what they write down, what notes they take.

The State Department Loyalty Security Board had a windup hearing on June 24. They told me then that their decision--up to that point--was favorable. They were in a tough spot. We were all unhappy, shall we say. The Tydings committee hearings of McCarthy's charges had been going on for three months and had produced a great deal of furor, but no clear refutation in the mind of the public of those wild charges.

By and large, the Department was quite helpful. We got a lot of information. We knew, for instance, that some of my reports in Jaffe's possession had Larsen's fingerprints on them, so he'd gotten them from Larsen; not from me. Information of that sort was proper to give us but if they'd wanted to be unfriendly, they might have withheld it.

Some of the wiretap information was rather amusing. They tapped a conversation between Jaffe and Gayn soon after I came back from China in 1945. One of them asked the other had he talked to Service and what did he think of him? The other man said, "Why, Service isn't even a liberal." [laughter] At any rate, the board gave a favorable decision and then we moved on the Tydings committee.

[371]

The Tydings Committee

J. SERVICE: We had a lot of hassling about whether the Tydings hearings would be open or executive. The committee wanted to have them closed. We insisted that they be open because McCarthy was finding out, from either Republican members or probably from the minority counsel, Robert Morris, something about what had gone on, which then he would give to the press in a very distorted way. This is a problem in Washington all the time of course. We've seen it more recently in other hearings. McCarthy was so unscrupulous and tricky about leaking stuff that had gone on in executive hearings that we wanted to have it all out in public.

At the last minute they agreed to our request to make it open. I called Lisa Green and my sister-in-law Helen and a few people rushed down. But there wasn't very much of a crowd of supporters because it wasn't until the last minute that we knew it was going to be open. Anyway, that was not particularly important.

The transcript is all in Part 1, pp. 1257 to 1453. We had three days of hearings. The third day they insisted on being closed because they'd had this so-called secret recording of a conversation between Jaffe and myself. It wasn't a recording at all. It was a transcription, an alleged transcription, of some sort of a wiretap or a listening device put in a room in Jaffe's hotel. It was incomplete, very garbled, and some parts unintelligible.

We got finally a statement out of the Department of Justice, and they said that it was excerpts, portions, of a transcript and that the original had been destroyed. We've never been able to get any access to the original. It's got me, as we say in the testimony, it's got me saying things that I couldn't possibly have said. It was scrambled and was obviously of very poor quality. But the FBI destroyed it, so we weren't able to get it.

LEVENSON: What about the legality of the process? The whole Amerasia case was surely flawed by this?

J. SERVICE: Of course. It's been argued that we should have made more of an issue--perhaps by refusing to be interrogated on the basis of such clearly illegal evidence. We didn't make any contest on admissibility. We took the point of view that when the loyalty of a public officer is involved, we were not going to make an issue of whether or not the evidence was obtained in a proper way. In a court of law, of course, it would not have been

[372]

J. SERVICE: admissible. Both the minority and the majority counsel got into hassles about this. Of course, all the members of the Tydings committee were lawyers, so they would do some more arguing.

The first day we had a long, long session. This was before there was TV. Photographers all over the place, lying down on the floor and flashing lights in your face. It was very annoying. I think they finally chased them away. Tydings was the chairman.

McCarthy got himself into a seat right behind Tydings. Hoping people would get pictures lined up, he sat there scowling the whole morning.

Photographed with McCarthy: "Oh, Hello John!"

J. SERVICE: Then at the noon recess--This had been a long morning. I'd read my statement and had some interrogation, and I was tired. We came out of the caucus room. A photographer came up and wanted to have a picture of me standing in front of the door.

I said, "The hell with it. You guys have been taking pictures all morning. You've got plenty of pictures. I just want to go and have some lunch."

Ed Rhetts said, "Oh come on, Jack. You might as well be agreeable. He doesn't mean anything. He's just trying to do his job, you know."

I stood in front of the door, the photographers got set, and then right out from behind the door popped Joseph McCarthy. He'd been hiding behind the door. He'd put this photographer up to it. So, we got this picture of startled me ( on Page 365a of hardcopy - not in this online document).

LEVENSON: Yes, I saw this picture recently in Dick Solomon's book, A Revolution is Not a Dinner Party. It s a repulsive picture, isn't it. Didn't he call you John?

J. SERVICE: This was later on. The last day as soon as the executive session was over, he came charging in to talk to the minority counsel to find out what had gone on. I was leaving with
Ed Rhetts. We were going out the door.

[373]

J. SERVICE: He was coming past me. He says, "Oh hello, John," in a most friendly, offhand way, you know, the son of a bitch. You just wish that there was something that you could have said or done, but it takes you so by surprise that you just pass on before you have any chance for any rebuttal.

Too Cool and Calm?

J. SERVICE: There was an interchange with [Senator Henry Cabot] Lodge which I think is off the record. Lodge was trying to find out how much I was privy to inside information, planning and so on. I wasn't, of course. I wasn't taken into any of the meetings at all in the headquarters. I wasn't in on military planning.

But, I did know about the messages we were getting from broken codes.

LEVENSON: Japanese codes.

J. SERVICE: Japanese codes. I was in on that, but of course I'd sworn completely, oath to the death, and so on. He started asking me about this. I wouldn't talk about it. We had quite a bit of a hassle with Senator Lodge about this, as to whether or not I could discuss this question. I think he got the idea that I had some knowledge of it.

Hickenlooper was very unfriendly, and Morris was very unfriendly. He had, obviously, cooperation from the FBI.

We were surprised--During the hearings with the State Department board new material kept coming in, that we (and they) hadn't heard about before.

What was happening was that they were apparently feeding this stuff to Morris, but since they were giving it to Morris at the Tydings committee they had to give it to State Department people also.

Most of it was the contents of my desk. You recall after I was arrested, I was asked, "The papers, where are the papers?" They weren't in my apartment. I said, "They re in my office." Then they went and took everything, all the contents of my desk.

[374]

J. SERVICE: Later on, after the grand jury cleared me, all this material was returned to me by the Department of Justice, as being my personal property. But, of course, they kept photostats of it all. This stuff then was now turned over to Morris, personal letters, personal correspondence, my address book. A lot of this correspondence was rather cryptographic. It was notes to people out in China.

I had written some note to Teddy White about prospects of Hurley being recalled. It didn't mention Hurley of course, Little Whiskers, or something like that, I forget--because the general feeling around here [Washington]--this was the Truman administration by this time--was that "good jobs should go to good party members." In other words, Hurley was a Republican politician, and why should he be ambassador to China?

This was wonderful stuff, Morris thought. I pointed out if he held it up to the light he could see that I'd erased the word "Democrats."

LEVENSON: The tone at the hearings at times is viciously antagonistic. How did you withstand those pressures?

J. SERVICE: Well, you know, you had to be cool, although some of the press people told me informally that they thought I should have shown a little more heat, you know. They thought that I was being too cool and calm. But, it seemed to me the best way to do it, the way we were doing it.

Annoying, sure. I think that my tone of voice may have been a little more heated than appears in the printed page. I don't know. I tend to be too wordy of course, as I am here now. I think this annoyed the senators or whoever was interrogating me. Sometimes I got too detailed, but by this time I'd been doing my homework for a long time and I had an awful lot of information. I'd been through the State Department board as sort of a warm up exercise, so I was primed. I probably was too verbose and too lengthy.

I had a funny experience after one of the hearings. People shared taxis, you know, in Washington. We were going back toward the State Department. Several people got in the taxi, newspaper people. One of them didn't say a word to me the whole time, but when he got out, as he was getting out of the car, he said, "I don't know how you think you can fool anybody with the shit you're saying up there," and walked off.

LEVENSON: Who was it?

[375]

J. SERVICE: I have no idea. He left before I had any chance to reply.

LEVENSON: How much of that sort of thing did you get?

J. SERVICE: Very little, very little.

By this time the Korean War had started. June 25, I think was the day it started. That was just before my last hearing on June 26. They were anxious to wrap things up and stop the hearings. So finally they did and wrote their report. It was ready in late July. It was presented as a committee document and approved by the committee and then presented to the Senate.

They had a terrific hassle in the Senate as to whether or not they would accept it. There was about two or three days of debate. Somehow I got tickets and was in the gallery. No one recognized me.

It was very exciting because Tydings went after McCarthy hammer and tongs, offered to play a tape recording of his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, which McCarthy later on had weaseled about and denied he'd said this and that and so on. Tydings had a tape recording, but they wouldn't let him play it in the Senate. But, it was very dramatic and very exciting. The Senate split on strict party lines as to whether or not to accept the report of the committee.

LEVENSON: The conclusion of the report was--

J. SERVICE: The conclusion of the report was very favorable to me. Do you want the report? It's a fairly hefty tome. They investigated the Amerasia case very, very thoroughly, a great deal of investigation of the Amerasia case all through these books. Their report goes into it in detail. They rejected Hurley's accusations.

The minority was going to put out a second report, but Hickenlooper never did. Lodge put out a very brief report in which he said that the investigation in the Service case was complete. He was satisfied with that, but he wasn't completely satisfied with the report in some other ways. For example, he didn't think the Lattimore case had been conclusive. It hadn't been complete or something of this sort.

It was very favorable as far as I was concerned.

[376]

Living from Pillar to Post

J . SERVICE: I'd been living in Washington, sort of camping on friends. I stayed with Phil Sprouse at first by his insistence which, since he was head of Chinese Affairs, was something of a gesture of support and courage on his part.

Most of these people suffered later on for this association.

LEVENSON: With you?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes. One of the problems that all of them had, was to explain their association and friendship with me. I stayed in a lot of different people's places.

Eventually I spent several months in a little attic room at the Freemans (Fulton Freeman, Tony Freeman, an old friend in the Foreign Service). They had a small house in Georgetown.

Ed Rhetts, as I said, came to Washington in the New Deal time, just after he finished law school, in the mid-30's and worked in various war jobs. He knew all the Washington lawyers, the New Deal crowd. They had a house out in Virginia, near Seven Corners. It's all built up now, but in those days it was country.

This was summer time, of course. They had a baseball game every Sunday afternoon, and a lot of Washington people would show up, and people from The Washington Post, Alan Barth, the chief editorial writer, a man named Al Friendly.

I got to know a great many people. Currie had been part of the same group, but he wasn't the baseball playing type, and he, at this time, wasn't associating with them at all apparently. Ben Cohen, I used to see occasionally.

I had supper with people like Eric Sevareid. I remember meeting [Senator Hubert] Humphrey at the Sevareids. Humphrey was talking about what a shame it was and how outrageous and so on. But, at that time, the best that the Democrats could think of was to try to outdo McCarthy, to prove they were more anti-Communist than anyone else. Humphrey was even talking about outlawing the Communist party. They were playing into the right wing's hands.

I used to go down to the office. After all, I was getting paid. But for a long time they didn't give me any jobs.

[377]

J. SERVICE: I got very much interested in Civil War history. I read a lot of books on Civil War history, multivolume works of Douglas Southall Freeman and Bruce Catton and so on. I used to go out and visit these battlefields--a lot of them are near Washington when I could. I made a hobby of statuary in Washington. I used to know every statue in Washington, I think.

Works Informally for Legal Adviser's Office: A Massive Indexing Project

J. SERVICE: I got started indexing. I was indexing the Tydings hearings for my own case, and that turned out to be useful for the Legal Adviser's office because that office was in charge of the State Department's interest and involvement. They found out I was indexing it, every day's transcripts. They got the transcripts for me and I would index them.

Then, in May, 1951, there were the MacArthur hearings. MacArthur had been fired by Truman and came back from Korea. They had joint hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations and Military Affairs committees--a very big affair. I indexed those for the Legal Adviser.

Theoretically--I was sitting in an office that dealt with supplies and equipment. But, [chuckling] I barely knew the people in the outfit. I didn't do any work of that sort; it was a place where I could be hidden away.

Then eventually in July, the I[nstitute of] P[acific] R[elations] hearings started. What happened was that the Tydings committee hearings were considered by right-wingers, the conservatives of the China Lobby, to be a failure. The Tydings report had come out, damning McCarthy, rejecting McCarthy's charges, ridiculing McCarthy's charges.

Then, the idea came up of investigating the IPR, which included everyone who was connected with the Far East. [tape off]

During this whole process I was really working for the Legal Adviser's office. Several times I was able to suggest material for them to use for rebuttal, material which they could feed to friendly senators. That was the way it was done. Senators who were friendly to the administration would be given questions or given material, given leads. I've got my index boxes of the Tydings hearings. You want to see them? (To be deposited in The Bancroft Library)

[377a]

Sample cards from Service index of Tydings committee hearings

[378]

LEVENSON: Yes. [tape off]

When you gave me copies of the Tydings hearings I was appalled at the difficulty of trying to find one's way through those thousands of pages. You've just told me downstairs in the basement that this is a unique copy of the index that you made at that period on the Tydings report. It's a wonderful scholarly resource. Those boxes are--?

J. SERVICE: They're both Loyalty Security Board. One is the documents, and the other one is testimony.

LEVENSON: Would you illustrate what you did, what sort of use it was to the Department?

J. SERVICE: They were very much concerned about anybody in the State Department that got involved. See, John Carter Vincent, page 4. We've got cards and cards on Vincent. Everything, about Vincent is there, so the State Department could check immediately, and would call me and ask me what my files showed.

LEVENSON: Then, these other two files--

J. SERVICE: We had to accumulate a lot of material. Eventually we had more than four hundred thousand documents that we used for reference or for evidence. So, we simply had to have those indexed and cataloged. That's what that file is.

Then, there were a lot of documents that were FBI documents, "B documents" for bureau documents. These were things that were seized in Jaffe's offices and so on. We were allowed to get access to those, although we couldn't keep them. We had to have some way of referring to those.

I was also being called on by the biographic information people in the research section of the State Department for information on [Chinese] Communists. The Communists had just come to power, but we didn't have much dope on them, so that I would be called sub-rosa.

Impossible to Locate All Jack's China Despatches

J. SERVICE: We also had my despatches, those that we were able to get hold of. So we had a whole series of these things that we could refer to. This was cross-indexed. Despatch number so-and-so, "See Document 182." You had to have various cross-indexes.

[379]

J. SERVICE: We had the Yenan reports, and those could be run down. See Document 164. It's also a B document. A lot of these things appeared several times. If they were in Jaffe's office they'd be a B document.

LEVENSON: Did the creation of these files really help you in preparation of your case and your eventual victory in the Supreme Court?

J. SERVICE: Oh, not so much after it got into court. It helped some, but this was mainly for use in the hearings themselves. When it got into the courts it was a matter of the legal issues rather than facts or rather than the actual circumstances of the case.

We had to do some research, of course, for preparing the briefs, but by and large, it was just for use in the proceedings themselves.

LEVENSON: You never did get, until the 1970s as I recall, the complete collection of your despatches?

J. SERVICE: No, it was impossible during the hearings to get them, because the only way they could look them up would be by our giving them some clue, despatch number or something like that, how it had been sent in from the field, from Chungking. We didn't know that in many cases. So, there were a lot of things we couldn't find. The file section people did some searching for us, and they found a good deal. The list that Kennan read, it's quite long but it's not complete. We got some despatches that had been found in Jaffe's office, these B documents. That helped us.

U.S. Foreign Relations have printed a lot, a great many actually, in the volumes for those years. Then, when Esherick wrote his book [Lost Chance In China] we had more clues.

He didn't go to Washington, but he wrote to the archives and they dug up things. They said that they couldn't really go through the files themselves. If we wanted to go to Washington and go through the archives for that period we were free to do so. But, we had enough. We had too much already, and Esherick didn't have the time.

I never have tried to assemble a complete collection. But I probably have most of the important ones since these were the ones most likely to be selected for partial or complete reproduction in Foreign Relations.

[380]

The 1950 Election: Tydings Defeated, McCarthy's Menacing Power Grows

J. SERVICE: I was saying before that after the initial strong support, the Department had to pull in its horns, be more careful, particularly after the November, 1950, elections when Tydings was defeated and a nonentity was put in. McCarthy got great credit for the defeat of Tydings. This really added greatly to his political threat.

The State Department decided that the sort of confrontational standing up to McCarthy, the tactics Lattimore used, wouldn't work. After the election, they became very much more cautious.

But, my friendly relations with the Legal Adviser's office on indexing the hearings and providing rebuttal information material, that continued. And so did my private life in Washington which put me close to a lot of important people, although I was a non-person in the State Department.

Caroline came home from India in the spring of '51. The Department couldn't decide what to do with me.

The State Department board had told me in June, when they finished the case, that they were satisfied. But new information kept being produced. New accusations would come in. Every time this happened, the case had to be reopened. It was very difficult to ever bring anything to a close.

The Ground Rules Change: From Suspicion of Disloyalty to "Reasonable Doubts of Loyalty"

J. SERVICE: Then, the standards were changed. Originally, there had to be a reasonable basis to consider you disloyal. Then that was changed to reasonable doubts of loyalty. All cases had to be reconsidered under the new rules.

LEVENSON: You were disloyal until you could prove yourself loyal?

J. SERVICE: That's right, yes. When you get a certain amount of notoriety and get talked about enough in the press, people come up with all sorts of wild accusations, some completely frivolous, some easy to disprove.

[381]

J. SERVICE: Anyway, they decided that I would have to be kept in Washington. It was publicly announced in December, 1950, that I had been cleared by the State Department. But this was only provisional.

They brought Caroline home. She came home in the spring of 1951. The children stayed in India for school and then came to the States.

By this time there had been rapid inflation due to the Korean War. It looked as though we were going to be staying in Washington. Of course, we expected to be cleared. There was no expectation of what finally happened.

So, [chuckling] we bought a house, at the worst possible time. It was sometime in the summer of '51. We shared ownership with my brother, Dick. This was the first time we'd ever owned a house, but we managed.

Caroline actually had saved some money during World War II. I had gotten an allowance for her, a rental allowance for her to get quarters. But, for various reasons she stayed on with her family. The allowance was not very large. But, anyway she had been able to save some money, and so she had something like six or seven thousand dollars that she saved. This was the down payment for our portion of the house.

The State Department, as I say, was wringing its hands about what to do with me. By this time Foreign Service personnel and departmental personnel had been brought under one personnel office. Pete Martin, I think, may have been head of personnel. I'd known him quite well in 1949 when I'd been working in the Department. He wanted to know if I couldn't volunteer for some specially arduous duty or something and get out of the State Department for a while on leave. He suggested the CIA. So, I said, "Okay, I'll try." I didn't think the CIA would take me!

I went over, saw a friend who had been in OSS during the war, and asked if the CIA could use me on some sort of "Mission Impossible." Of course, [chuckling] their security people were not going to have anything to do with me, so that fell through.

LEVENSON: It seems a bizarre notion in the climate of the times?

J. SERVICE: Yes.

Then Martin said couldn't I retire? I pointed out the law and so on. I couldn't retire until I was 50, and I wasn't planning to resign. Anyway, the Department was unhappy.

[382]

J. SERVICE: At one of these meetings I sort of blew up about the dilly-dallying and pointed out that I had been trying not to implicate people who had been in the administration and people who had been my superiors such as Vincent and Currie.

I wrote a letter about this to Vincent. I think the easiest way to handle it is just to put the letter in the record.(Appendix IV) [tape off]

LEVENSON: Thank you for that. That's May 16, 1951, six pages.

Kuomintang Propaganda from Taiwan Supplied to United States Senators and Translated by Library of Congress Staff

J. SERVICE: About this time--in February actually I think it was--the press told us that Chinese intelligence reports from Taiwan had been supplied to some senators interested in the question of China policy--the assumption was Knowland and McCarthy--and that they were being translated for the senators by the Library of Congress.

I went up to the Library of Congress and talked to the head of the Far Eastern section, which was old Arthur Hummel [Sr.], you know, compiler of Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period.

LEVENSON: Oh, sure.

J. SERVICE: I wanted to get either copies of the Chinese originals, or copies of the translations. He was very sorry, but the Library of Congress couldn't allow me to. It was an agency of the Senate or the Congress, and they could only work for Congress. So, it was something that he couldn't let me have. Whichever senator it was, and I assume it was McCarthy, he leaked the reports to Fulton Lewis. Then Fulton Lewis had a fine sensational series of his reports.

"Chiang Kai-shek had a wily crew of Chinese counter-intelligence agents on his payroll." It describes how they followed John Stewart Service around, and it has the silly garbage about my having an affair with Chou En-lai's secretary. Chinese Mata Hari. It's just absolutely, absolutely ridiculous sort of stuff. Anyway, that's sort of an interesting exhibit maybe. (See Appendix V)

[383]

LEVENSON: I certainly think so.

J. SERVICE: I wrote some corrections and so on, but I didn't try to publish them. Nothing was ever done with them. I just pointed out the many errors and inaccuracies.

LEVENSON: To whom did you send that stuff?

J. SERVICE: I didn't send it to anybody. [laughing] There was no use trying to get in a public fight with J. Fulton Lewis Jr. Oh, you have a question?

LEVENSON: Yes, I had a question, Library of Congress and Arthur Hummel. Public funds, light security--how was it that you couldn't get copies?

J. SERVICE: Well, this was what he said. A mission had been given to him by whatever senators were involved--he wouldn't even mention what senators it was--and therefore it was confidential. So the only thing we had was what Fulton Lewis Jr. was able to get and publish.

LEVENSON: Were you ever aware of Chiang Kai-shek's counter-intelligence following you around?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes, in Chungking certainly.

LEVENSON: But not in Washington?

J. SERVICE: No.

LEVENSON: This business of the Chinese Mata Hari, was this picked up by other press people?

J. SERVICE: Not at the time. No, the press ignored this. It was so silly I don't think there was very much on it. My press clippings would show. (To be deposited in The Bancroft Library)

LEVENSON: Do you feel that there were slightly more respectable press standards then of invasion of private life than exist now?

J. SERVICE: Yes, I would say so. Also there was somewhat more reserve about McCarthy by this time than there had been when he started. This was in '51, and a lot of his stuff had been proven to be baloney and the press was considerably more skeptical about some of it by '51.

[384]

Jack Requests that the Secretary of State Remove His Name from the Promotion List

J. SERVICE: The selection boards met every year at the beginning of the year. In early 1951 they met, and I was eligible for promotion. I was talking to a man named Butrick, an old friend who'd been in Shanghai. He'd been outraged at the recommendation I'd made when I was in personnel in '49 that retirement age for career ministers be reduced to sixty like the rest of the Foreign Service. Under the Act at that time it was sixty-five. We had too many career ministers and one problem was getting rid of them.

I forget now what the connection was, why I happened to be seeing him--we were talking about the selection boards, and the lists apparently were out--he was annoyed about some of the people that were on the board. Something he said gave me a tip-off that I probably was on the list that had been selected for promotion.

I realized that this could make a real problem for the State Department because under the regulations if they cut my name out, no one below me would be able to be promoted, you see. So, I wrote to [Carlisle H.] Humelsine. I wrote the secretary of state, of course, but I took it to Humelsine who then was the acting administrative man--Peurifoy had left--asking that my name be taken off the list if it was on.

Later on I found out I was on the list. It would have been very nice, of course, to have been class I, But I would never have gotten confirmation at that time, so I was not really giving up anything by withdrawing my name.

An Intimation of Trouble

J. SERVICE: About this time we got an intimation of trouble. I was talking to Tony [Fulton] Freeman, whose family I'd been living with for part of the time. Tony was in the Department. Some American woman had come to see him in some agitation after she'd had lunch at the Chinese embassy.

By now, it had appeared in the press that Service had been cleared. The wife of the Chinese ambassador had said, "Isn't it terrible how they could clear that man Service?" Then, she went
on with the story about my having an illegitimate child in China.

[384a]

(COPY)

DEPARTMENT OF STATE
WASHINGTON

March 23, 1951

AIR MAIL

The Honorable
The Secretary of State
Washington, D.C.

Sir:

I have the honor, risking presumptuousness, to lay before you a personal request.

Perhaps I may be excused, in the light of the following factors, for assuming that the Selection Board which convened in January, 1951, may have considered me for promotion:

(a) this is my second year of eligibility for promotion;

(b) my Selection Board rating in 1950, according to information supplied me at my request through established channels, was relatively close to the promotable zone;

(c) an efficiency report, which I have no reason to believe would be unfavorable, was assumedly available to the Board for six months (August 1, 1949 to January 31, 1950) of the most recent efficiency reporting period)

(d) the Board presumably had knowledge of the favorable report in July, 1950, by majority and minority members of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee and also of the favorable
decision and review of my loyalty case by the Department of State Loyalty Security Board and Deputy Under Secretary for Administration.

I understand, however, that the Loyalty Review Board has act not yet taken action, either favorable or unfavorable, in my case. Under this circumstance of the loyalty clearance process being still incomplete, I would consider it inappropriate to accept promotion.

My request, therefore, is that I not be considered for, and if selected be permitted to decline, any class promotion until after favorable action has been taken in my case by the Loyalty Review Board. If the Selection Board has already recommended my promotion, I ask that my name be removed from the list. I assume that this action on my part will not prejudice my being considered for promotion by the first and following Boards subsequent to the clearance which I am morally certain will eventually be given me by the Loyalty Review Board.

This request would have been made earlier if I had had knowledge or expectation that final action by the Loyalty Review Board would be so long delayed.

Respectfully,

John S. Service
Foreign Service Officer

[385]

J. SERVICE: This woman came into the Department, rather agitated, because she wanted to be sure that the "full facts were known." She or someone else apparently also went to the FBI. So, a few days later the FBI came around to interview me.

Anyway, we wrote a long letter to the Loyalty Security Board about this whole business, pointing out absurdities in the story, the claim that Val was a Communist, and so on, and noting that the child was born seventeen months after I left China.

LEVENSON: Thank you.

J. SERVICE: We told this to Caroline, but I don't think we told the children about this at this time because we didn't expect it to become public. Later on it was obvious that it was liable to become public.

When we get to the Loyalty Review Board we'll find that the Loyalty Review Board had this same story, although they never used it in the hearing. But this was very much in their minds. We got more information later on.

"Pertinent Excerpts"

J. SERVICE: In the fall of 1951, the IPR [Institute of Pacific Relations] hearings had been going on for a long time and had ranged all over the map. The McCarran committee used it to bring in everything they could.

They used Wedemeyer to attack me. They never called me. They didn't want me to appear, I'm sure. By pulling excerpts out of various reports that I had written, they got Wedemeyer to make some very foolish statements.

I wrote an article which the Foreign Service Journal published in October 1951 which was called "Pertinent Excerpts." See Appendix VI).

LEVENSON: [laughing] That's a good title.

[386]

J. SERVICE: Perhaps I'd better give you an unmarked copy. That's an offprint.

LEVENSON: Oh, thank you.

J. SERVICE: Anyway, this got some notice and was printed in a number of different places. The Boston Herald picked it up, and the paper in Providence. This was the Providence Evening Bulletin.

LEVENSON: With favorable comment?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes. It was favorable. But it was sort of embarrassing for the Journal a couple months later to have the blow fall.

Loyalty Review Board Hearings Under Ex-Senator Hiram Bingham, November 8, 1951

J. SERVICE: On October 11, we got a letter rather surprisingly it was surprising to us from the Loyalty Review Board, saying that they were going to hold their own hearings. That's the letter. (See Appendix VII.)

LEVENSON: From Hiram Bingham, ex-senator from Connecticut.

J. SERVICE: It says that "the charges [reading from the letter] will be based upon the charges heretofore issued to you by the Department of State Loyalty Security Board."

We had gotten a specific charge from the Loyalty Review Board, so we assumed--we read this literally--assumed that our charges would be the same. There wasn't much for us to do in the way of preparation. We just sort of went in and said, "Here we are." We didn't prepare a case.

The thing was actually held in early November, November 8. Three very distinguished elderly lawyers. The early morning hearing was very rigorous and concentrated heavily on Jaffe and my association with Jaffe. I was very discouraged at noon time, but Ed [Rhett] said, "Oh, don't worry." He didn't think it was that bad. These guys were good lawyers, competent and experienced and they knew how to conduct a good cross-questioning.

[387]

J. SERVICE: The afternoon was rather deceptive because it was very relaxed. They asked me about what life was like in Yenan and my contacts with Foreign Service officers. Everyone laughed about some of the reports such as the views of Captain Alsop.

Bingham was present himself most of the time--a rather forbidding, scowling presence--just as an observer. But, he wasn't a member of the panel.

A staff member of the Loyalty Review Board asked some silly questions. He was a real know-nothing type. The only one of his questions I recall was to the effect that I had referred to "C-C" many times in reports, to the "C-C Clique," and did this mean Chinese Communists? Well, of course, the C-C Clique is well known to anybody involved in Chinese affairs. It meant the Ch'en brothers, Ch'en Kuo-fu and Ch'en Li-fu--the right-wing clique of the Kuomintang. This was the expertise of the staff of the Loyalty Review Board.

As soon as I read the transcript, it was clear to me that they had in their minds quite different charges from the ones in the original letter of October 11. The original charge was that I was a Communist or associated with Communists in such a way as to betray the security interests of the United States. The charge that they had in mind was a different thing in the regulations, a different section in the regulations about "willful disclosure of confidential information."

I pointed this out to Ed. I wrote him a short memo, I think, and I pointed out how the whole thrust of the questioning indicated they were confused about what charges I had been given in my original letter.

Ed said, "By God, I think you've got a point here." So, he went over to see the board. They were very embarrassed. They said, "Yes, that's right." They apparently never even read the original charges.

[388]

J. SERVICE: One funny thing, when Ed Rhetts went to talk to Hiram Bingham about the mixup in the charges, he noted that the only book on China, and very prominently displayed on Bingham's desk, was Freda Utley's book. I forget the title--I think it is The China Story. She was an ex-Communist, and it's a violently anti-Communist, pro-right wing diatribe.

Ed Rhetts made some reference to the book, and Bingham said, yes, he thought it was pretty good. Of course, [chuckling] it may have been done for intimidation, I don't know. [laughter] But, it's not generally regarded as a very authoritative book on China.

So, then what to do about the mixup in the charges? They said, "Well, we can have hearings all over again if you want." But, they didn't think it would make any difference.

Ed's own feeling was that these were very experienced, reputable lawyers. They suggested a stipulation that the hearings were conducted as if we had been informed of the charges. Ed said that his reaction was, as a lawyer, that these people would not use a technicality like this to hang one. Therefore, it must mean that they were going to decide in my favor. He thought we'd be okay to go ahead and sign the stipulation. So, we signed, waiving my right to a new hearing.

LEVENSON: Was that your downfall?

J. SERVICE: Well, no, not really, because they had decided to fire me any way. If we'd had new hearings it wouldn't have made any difference. But it enraged Ed Rhetts. He felt that it was low tactics.

They had decided that they were going to fire me. They had decided on the morning of November 8 when they had lunch together. They sat over in one part of the dining room, and we sat in another part of the dining room. Obviously by lunch time they had made their decision and reached their conclusion.

The afternoon session was just so that it didn't look too much like a kangaroo court. In other words they wanted to make the hearing last a little longer, but they hadn't really any need to know much more, so the afternoon was very relaxed. I don't think that signing the stipulation was our downfall in the sense it could have altered things any.

LEVENSON: In your opinion what were the grounds for their decision at that time?

[388a]

4608 Butterworth Place N.W.
Washington 16, DC
Nov. 10, 1951

Dear Mother: prepare by reviewing

This is Saturday afternoon and I am sitting here in Ed Rhetts' office. Had hoped to get some work done but don t seem able to get my mind on it.

The Loyalty Review Board hearing was Thursday--all day. We had prepared no brief, simply tried to prepare by reviewing everything as thoroughly as possible and put ourselves at their disposal for such questions as they might wish to ask. After all, they had called the hearing and we thought we had covered everything in the first hearing before the State Dept Board.

What we got was an extremely rigorous "expert" interrogation. Not unfriendly but leaving one exhausted and feeling as though he had been run over--and back and forth--by a bull dozer. That was for 3 1/2 hours during the a.m.; devoted entirely to contacts and conversations, etc, with Jaffe. Here of course the great difficulties are: the "defendant" can't see the evidence in the hands of the Board; (2) that "evidence" is not the actual recordings but what the FBI says was said. Here you are at the mercy of a number of factors such as failure of the FBI agent or device to record clearly, and obvious confusion and apparent summarization. One result is alleged statements which are unintelligible, contradictory or impossible. (3) Finally, my few conversations with Jaffe had no particular significance at the time and were no different in content or substance from conversations with many others. It is therefore impossible after 6 years to remember them separately or with any detail.

The afternoon session--about 2 hours--was very different--relaxed and general, and apparently designed chiefly to draw me out and give them some chance to size me up.

The Board panel was apparently the best that could have been put up. All three lawyers (2 from New York and 1 from Boston), older men from top firms and all with excellent reputation. Ed's professional reaction was that short of the Supreme Court, it would not be possible to assemble a more experienced and capable group, whose fairness and objectivity could be more relied on.

A second point on which we were much pleased was that it was immediately clear that they had all studied the full record meticulously and were minutely familiar with it. What we had most feared was that the sheer bulk would prove too much. We were quickly put to rest on that: they had even done things such as reading my reports.

We were given a complete option as to what course we wished to pursue further. It was clearly unwise to try to keep going that day: it had already been exhausting, not only to us but also to them. Ed felt, however, that it would be desirable--for the record--to tie up some of the points raised during the day in a more complete and thorough way than had been possible during the oral "hot and heavy". We are therefore planning to prepare and present a partial "brief" in writing. Since we probably won't get the transcript of the hearing itself for 2 weeks, we have been given 3 weeks to submit the brief. Neither Ed nor I feel that this will have any effect on the outcome. These men know the case so thoroughly that their mind is made up, we think favorably. However, for the sake of the record, our brief--which will be a sort of summation--may be a good thing.

Of course all this works to delay the final result--but what are a few more weeks! We should have their verdict sometime in December. Caroline is unhappy over the delay but I cannot help that.

Much love,
Jack

[389]

J. SERVICE: These people were under a great deal of public pressure, the atmosphere of the times. They were convinced, I think, that the State Department had been too lax. They didn't understand anything from personal experience about the wartime background, the special circumstances in China, the relations with the press.

They obviously were informed about my personal life and were very concerned about that.

Later on we got a leak, again through McCarthy, of the minutes of the discussions in which they apparently all agreed that the State Department should have declared me unsuitable and fired me on those grounds.

LEVENSON: On moral grounds?

J. SERVICE: On moral grounds. We'll come to that pretty soon.

Some Further Notes

LEVENSON: Was there anything of substance in the off-the-record discussions that you can now talk about? This "off the record" occurs three times in the Loyalty Review Board transcript. These may be irrelevancies.

J. SERVICE: Oh, good Lord. I don't remember, except I suppose we may have had some discussion of the same business that we had off the record in the Tydings thing about Japanese codes.

There's one thing that's absolutely certain and that is that they did not--Nowhere in the hearings and nowhere in the report and findings was there ever any mention of my having had an affair in Chungking. This was completely ignored. There wasn't any mention of it by the board or any members during the hearing nor, as I say, in their decision. I just can't recall now what was off the record.

The silly thing about this whole thing is that the panel, you see, the Loyalty Review Board, does not consider security and they do not consider unsuitability. The only thing that they consider is loyalty. Their whole case was built on my association with Jaffe. But, in their internal discussion apparently there was a great deal of discussion about my personal affairs and love life, if you will, which is completely outside their purview. That's why they couldn't make any mention of it in the decision.

[390]

J. SERVICE: But, my being given access to these coded, deciphered Japanese telegrams was, of course, long after my affair with Yun-ju, and the army knew about it. I made sure that G-2 knew about it right at the very inception, so that the army didn't consider me a security risk.

LEVENSON: One of the things that struck me very strongly was the fundamental ignorance of some of the members of the review board as to circumstances in China in '44 to '45, the geography, et cetera. Mr. Clark asks you about Yenan and what were the physical conditions there.

"Was there anything in the way of hotel accommodations there?"

You say, "No, sir. I need a map."

Mr. Alger says, "Oh, never mind that."

J. SERVICE: They were retired lawyers, all reputable citizens, mostly corporate lawyers from New York, I think. But they didn't have any background or knowledge. The only thing you can say is that it was a far better panel than we had later on when Davies had his hearings, when you had somebody from the Small Business Administration and someone from the Geological Survey or something like that, completely outside any relationship or knowledge of foreign affairs or the conduct of foreign affairs.

These people, as I said the other day, I think had pretty much made up their minds beforehand.

LEVENSON: What about standards of evidential validity, the sorts of things that lawyers are supposedly trained in doing, assessing the value of evidence?

J. SERVICE: I would say that the most shocking example of that was the Senate later on. I don't remember these people being so outrageous.

LEVENSON: Why, in your opinion, did Humelsine take so long perusing your record? He must have known it backwards and forwards by this time.

J. SERVICE: Things did keep coming up, you know. I think I mentioned before that the Loyalty Security Board would make a decision, and then there would be a new evidence. This kept happening. We had the new Chinese intelligence stuff that was put out by McCarthy through Fulton Lewis. Then, we had the Chinese embassy starting

[391]

J. SERVICE: the story about my having an illegitimate child. Then, we had changes in the regulations, change in the standards, and every time, it all had to be reconsidered.

Humelsine and the State Department were in a real quandary. The Loyalty Security Board, the State Department board, cleared me, but Humelsine didn't want to have to grasp the nettle because he knew there was going to be a lot of heat. So, I think he put it off and put it off, because they really didn't know just what was going to happen if they publicly cleared me.

He couldn't give his final okay until the Loyalty Review Board had post-audited it. The system then was that the Loyalty Review Board had to post-audit. They had thrown the case back once already before. So that they had to wait for the Loyalty Review Board.

That's probably the most important reason of all really, in practical terms. He felt he couldn't make any sort of final and firm decision until the Loyalty Review Board had acted. The Loyalty Review Board was subject to these same things, the changing of standards, new evidence coming in, and so on.

LEVENSON: Do you feel that you were used as the Department scapegoat in the China matter?

J. SERVICE: No, I don't think so. I wasn't used as the Department scapegoat. There's just no basis for that. The Department, as I say, was pretty much on my side. The State Department at the Humelsine level, the top level, tried to cut its losses at the last minute. They weren't going to make any fight about it. But, up to that point they had stuck by me through a lot of thick and thin.

I was a scapegoat in a sense, a whipping boy-- That isn't the right word. I turned out to be an easy, vulnerable target for McCarthy and for the China Lobby and for the Kuomintang and for [Albert] Kohlberg, K-o-h-l-b-e-r-g.

LEVENSON: Right. That's the end of what I had prepared.

J. SERVICE: Let's shut it off and have tea. [tape off]

[392]

Fired as of the Close of Business. "How did you Know so Soon?"

J. SERVICE: About this time my friend [Raymond P.] Ludden had received an interrogatory. Many people were beginning to receive interrogatories. John Carter Vincent had been called back to the Department to testify before the IPR hearings. [John Fremont] Melby had been given interrogatories.

Ludden was very concerned about how to handle it. There was some question of the procedural details. I said to him, "Well, let's go down to the Loyalty Security Board s office." They had an office there in the main building of the State Department.

So, we walked in, and it was like the time when I complained about Grew's statement about the chicken coop. The man's face just froze. He said, "How did you know so soon?"

I said, "Know what?"

So, he said, "The Loyalty Review Board has ruled against you."

They told us about it. The secretary had red eyes. She obviously was upset. Everyone was upset. There wasn't much to do.

I called Ed, and he immediately asked for a delay, asked for an appointment to see Humelsine so we could talk the thing over. Humelsine wouldn't see us till five or five-thirty.

Alan Earth from the Post came over to the office. We talked, and Ed felt very strongly that we had a case, that the Loyalty Review Board did not have this authority to overrule cases that had been decided in favor of the employee. They could be an appeal board, but since the State Department had not appealed, they couldn't arbitrarily assume control of a case, as they were doing, and then decide against the employee.

We went in to Humelsine at five, and by that time the press releases were out. The State Department had a lengthy press release, the full text of the Loyalty Review Board's decision, and the full text of their own board's decision, and saying that I would be fired as of the close of business the next day.

Humelsine refused to consider any delay or hold it up. [paraphrasing Humelsine] "Too late. Press has already got these releases."

[392a]

PERSONAL STATEMENT OF JOHN S. SERVICE

The Loyalty Review Board s decision is a surprise, a shock and an injustice. I am not now and never have been disloyal to the United States. The Board expressly states that it does not find me disloyal.

What it has done is to have a “reasonable doubt” on a single episode which occurred six and a half years ago, which has been freely admitted by me and known to all responsible quarters since that time and for which I have been tried and unanimously acquitted at least nine times.

That episode involved discussing normal and proper background information with a journalist whom I believed, and had every reason to believe at the time, to be nothing more than the editor of a reputable specialist magazine dealing with the Far East. The selected background information which I gave him did not adversely affect, or even deal with, the national interests of the United states, nor did it come within the meaning of regulations defining the classification SECRET and CONFIDENTIAL. The information involved was known, or at least available to all of the American correspondents in China. The only thing that kept these facts about China from an uninformed American public was a foreign censorship. The same information had been used repeatedly by me, with official approval, in discussing the situation in China with other writers and researchers in the United States.

I am confident that my record of 18 1/2 years' service to the American Government and the testimony of the many people who have worked with me during that period will support me in my conviction that there is no doubt of my loyalty.

December 13, 1951

[392b]

Department of State
For the Press
December 13, 1951
No. 1088

The Department of State announced today that the Loyalty Review Board of the Civil Service Commission has advised the Department that this Board has found a reasonable doubt as to the loyalty of John Stewart Service, Foreign Service Officer.

Today's decision of the Loyalty Review Board is based on the evidence which was considered by the Department's Board and found to be insufficient on which to base a finding of "reasonable doubt" as to Mr. Service s loyalty or security. Copies of the Opinions of both Boards are attached.

The Department of State s Loyalty Security Board, on July 31, 1951, had reaffirmed its earlier findings that Service was neither disloyal nor a security risk, and the case had been referred to the Loyalty Review Board for post-audit on September 4, 1951. The Loyalty Review Board assumed Jurisdiction of Mr. Service's case on October 9, 1951.

The Chairman of the Loyalty Review Board in today's letter to the Secretary (full text attached) noted:

"The Loyalty Review Board found no evidence of membership in the Communist Party or in any organization on the Attorney General's list on the part of John Stewart Service. The Loyalty Review Board did find that there is a reasonable doubt as to the loyalty of the employee, John Stewart Service, to the Government of the United States, based on the intentional and unauthorized disclosure of documents and information of a confidential and non-public character within the meaning of subparagraph d of paragraph 2 of Part V, Standards, of Executive Order No. 9835, as amended."

The Opinion of the Loyalty Review Board stressed the points made above by the Chairman--that is, it stated that the Board was not required to find and did not find Mr. Service guilty of disloyalty, but it did find that his intentional and unauthorized disclosure of confidential documents raised reasonable doubt as to his loyalty. The State Department Board while censoring Mr. Service for indiscretions, believed that the experience Mr. Service had been through as a result of his indiscretions in 1945 had served to make him far more than normally security conscious. It found also that no reasonable doubt existed as to his loyalty to the Government of the United States. On this point the State Department Board was reversed.

The Chairman of the Loyalty Review Board has requested the Secretary of State to advise the Board of the effective date of the separation of Mr. Service. This request stems from the provisions of Executive Orders 9835 and 1024l--which established the President's Loyalty Program and the Regulations promulgated thereon. These Regulations are binding on the Department of State.

The Department has advised the Chairman of the Loyalty Review Board that Mr. Service's employment has been terminated.

[393]

LEVENSON: Was this cleared by the secretary of state?

J. SERVICE: We don't know for sure, but as far as we could find out, the State Department immediately got in touch with the White House and said, "What do we do?"

The White House said, "You've got to fire him. Too much heat. The president has appointed the Loyalty Review Board, he can't overrule them, and you've just got to go ahead and fire him."

LEVENSON: When you say, "the White House," do you have any idea whether it went as far as Truman?

J. SERVICE: We just don't know. He had a legal adviser named Murphy. I think we've got some correspondence with him. It may have been Truman. We don't know.

The whole attitude of the State Department people under [Dean] Acheson was to save him as much as possible because he'd been burned so badly on the Hiss case, you see. After Hiss was convicted he made a statement, "I will not turn my back." The repercussions and backlash on this had been venomous and terrible,

One of McCarthy's famous--not famous--one of his favorite ways of referring to me, for instance, in public speeches was, "John Service who Acheson will not turn his back on," you know, this sort of thing. I'm not sure whether Acheson was involved. I suppose he must have okayed it.

LEVENSON: Did you know Acheson personally?

J. SERVICE: Not really. I'd met him in '45 just briefly after my arrest. I was going out to lunch with John Carter Vincent or something, and we ran into Acheson and had some sort of joking conversation for a short while.

Rhetts had tried to appeal to him at one time to move things along when our case was being delayed, and there's a letter somewhere in the stuff here. But, I'd not had any personal contact.

A group of Foreign Service officers tried to talk to him about the case, but I'm not sure how soon they were able to do this. It couldn't have been this day because no one knew it during this day. It must have been afterward.

I think he intimated to them that he just couldn't do anything about it, his hands were tied. So, I think it all points to the fact that the real decision was made in the White House.

[394]

Outrage and Indignation

LEVENSON: What was the impact on you compared, for instance, to the Amerasia disaster?

J. SERVICE: The Amerasia thing, as I said, I felt a terrible sense of shame and disgrace. In this one I didn't at all because it was just outrage, indignation.

The press bothered us for a while. We started getting crank phone calls and crank letters, but then I'd been getting crank letters all the way through. That didn't bother me so much. The phone calls were a nuisance.

LEVENSON: What sort of crank phone calls? S

J. SERVICE: Oh, obscenities. "You lesbian--" Caroline's mother was visiting us and she'd pick up the phone and this breathy voice calling her a lesbian. Cranks got loyalty and homosexuality all mixed up with the State Department. It was crazy.

Eric Sevareid had a fine broadcast which I suppose I can dig up--a very friendly broadcast. (See following pages 394a-394c)

Well, the next day I went around to say goodbye to some people in the State Department. [tape off]

Practically Bare. No Job, No Retirement, No Pension, Nothing, No Insurance

J. SERVICE: The Foreign Service Journal ran a good editorial. Some Foreign Service friends wanted to start a defense fund. It seemed desirable to have a well known sponsor. Howland Shaw, an old timer, retired, former chief of personnel, was suggested. I talked to him. He immediately and gladly accepted the idea. In fact other people had already spoken to him. So he wrote the letter suggesting the fund.

We got a lawyer outside, an old friend of mine, outside the Department to act as treasurer--he agreed to do it--John Reid, R-e-i-d. We promised people that they would be anonymous, because McCarthy at that time was trying to find out who contributed to such causes. There had been a fuss about my earlier fund in 1945, and exaggerated amounts had been put out. Actually, I had turned some of that money back and suggested it be given to Larsen.

[394a]

Eric Sevareid - Dec. 14, 1951

This reporter would like to step a bit out of character, on two counts. I would like to make a few purely personal assertions, improvable by their nature, but the truth of which I deeply believe, and to make these statements, not about an issue, but about a man. I wish to talk about Mr. John Service, whose long career as an American diplomat was broken last night, when the federal Loyalty Review Board concluded that his loyalty to his country was in doubt.

This must be personal because my knowledge of this case is personal; I have known John Service over a period of eight years, in China and in Washington. It is my personal conviction, based on much first hand knowledge, that the American diplomatic service contained no more brilliant, devoted, self-sacrificing field agent--his unusually rapid rise in the service, the extraordinary prophetic quality of his reports from China attest to that. It is also my unshakable personal conviction, based on not only the same testimony the Review Board considered, not only upon intimate memories of the special wartime atmosphere and procedures at the period of the Amerasia case, but also upon the instinctive human knowledge which friendship produces, that John Service was, and is, a completely loyal American citizen. That is not only one man's belief; it is the belief of all his colleagues in the diplomatic service; it was the belief not only of the grand jury which first heard the Amerasia story; it was the belief of all those able and honorable men who conducted not one, two or three, but six other investigations of this most thoroughly investigated loyalty case in American history.

Certain things must be understood - no new evidence was produced by Senator McCarthy or before the Review Board; all of

[394b]

it was in, years ago; Service has never withheld a shred of evidence he told the whole story freely and openly. Immediately he realized the Amerasia crowd were not the responsible journalists he had been assured they were. It should be understood that the Review Board has not found him to be disloyal; it has decided only that it has a doubt as to his loyalty; under the new ground rules on these cases, that is all it had to find. Under these rules, the accused, contrary to the ancient rules prevailing in court of law, does not enjoy the benefit of the doubt. Mere doubt can destroy a reputation, a career, all that makes life worth living for a citizen who happens to be in the federal service.

In a career without blemish before, without blemish since, John Service made one serious mistake; he gave verbal and documentary information about China, as background, to journalists who were not what he thought they were. In wartime, background briefing by diplomats and soldiers was a necessary and commonplace procedure. He gave me similar information in China, when we first met, but not, nay I add, without having me vouched for, despite my uniform and credentials. He was not a careless, loose-tongued man, by any means, but he did make one mistake.

Ho was by no means alone in that. At least, once in the war General George C. Marshall, as Chief of Staff, briefed a number of us on highly secret information, when there was present a journalist who later turned out to be a strict communist party liner. Despite their facilities, Marshall's security officers had made a mistake, an honest mistake. The same kind of mistake, I feel certain, has been made time and time again by high ranking diplomats and officers in briefing groups of reporters. No one has suggested, or would suggest that there is any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, about the

[394c]

loyalty of those officials. Service's mistake was an honest one. But his career and his name have been destroyed.

I have said all this because a reporter has a special obligation to report any personal knowledge of a public issue, and, because friendship carries with it, certain obligations, too.

[395]

J. SERVICE: Of course, I wasn't old enough to retire, so they returned my contribution to the retirement fund. I got a lump sum payment for my accumulated leave, but they agreed to hold that over till the next year so that it wouldn't all be taxable in one year. But even that made a problem for income tax. I had about a half year of accumulated leave, which is the maximum you can accumulate in the Foreign Service.

The State Department Foreign Service Association had a group insurance policy with Equitable Life. One provision was that if one left the service they had to convert your policy to an ordinary life policy. You had to drop out of the group policy.

I went around to see the Equitable man in town in Washington who dealt with the Department for years on this group policy. I wanted to buy a term policy because it was a lot cheaper. I could get more coverage. At that time I had nothing, you see. I was practically bare with no job, no retirement, no pension, nothing, no insurance. So, I wanted to get term, and he refused to sell it to me.

The only thing he would do was what he was required to do by the agreement, give me ordinary straight life. I said, "Why?" He said, "Well you know, after all, you might jump out of a window or something." This was apparently a reference to the case of Larry Duggan, who had done just that after accusations and rough interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Exhausting Administrative Appeals

J. SERVICE: We immediately tried to appeal. Before you can take anything to a court you have to exhaust all administrative appeals. So, we appealed to the Loyalty Review Board.

About this time McCarthy got some leaks of minutes of Loyalty Review Board discussions. He tried to get these published. He gave them to some of the press. We found out about it from The Washington Post. [tape off]

Some reference was made to it--I see, I've got a clipping here from the Post--but they didn't use all of it. It talks about my association with a woman who was alleged to be a Russian spy, which my letter denies. It talks about how they felt that Service was "unsuitable for public service," said by Perkins.

[396]

J. SERVICE: There was a lot of discussion about the State Department not having discharged anybody or allowed people to resign. In the Post Office Department, ten percent of all persons examined were found worthy of separation, the Commerce Department, six and a half percent. The average was about six percent. The State Department was zero. These are statements made by Mr. [Hiram] Bingham, the chairman.

LEVENSON: I think that's very interesting.

J. SERVICE: We wrote to the board asking for these minutes, and that was declined. I think all this correspondence we can put in here later on.

We appealed to the Civil Service Commission which is over the Loyalty Review Board, and they refused our appeal. Then we wrote to the president. A presidential staff member wrote back saying that he was very sorry, but there was nothing he could do.

We appealed the decision, but we also appealed the fact that these minutes were prejudicial.

After the president had rejected any reconsideration or appeal, then there was nothing to do except to take it to the courts. Ed felt we had a good case. He was confident we could win on this question of lack of authority by the Loyalty Review Board.

But it was going to be a long business. We realized that we probably would have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. But he was willing to do it partly because he'd developed a very strong personal interest, and also he felt that we'd been outrageously treated by the Loyalty Review Board.

So, we went ahead. I promised him that I would not withdraw. He didn't want us to get involved and then pull out. I think that's probably a good place to stop, isn't it?

LEVENSON: Yes. Thank you, Jack,

GO TO Chapter XII

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