John S. Service
Encyclopedia
John Stewart Service was an American diplomat who served in the Foreign Service
in China
prior to and during the World War II
. Considered one of the State Department's "China Hands
," he was an important member of the Dixie Mission
to Yan'an
. Service correctly predicted that the Communists would defeat the Nationalists in a civil war, but he and other diplomats were blamed for the "loss" of China in the domestic political turmoil following the 1949 Communist triumph in China. In the immediate postwar years, Service was accused in the Amerasia Affair
in 1945, of which a Grand Jury cleared him of wrongdoing.
In 1950 U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an attack against Service, which led to investigations of the reports Service wrote while stationed in China. Secretary of State Dean Acheson fired Service, but in 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered his reinstatement in a unanimous decision.
in the Sichuan
province of China, on August 3, 1909. The son of missionaries working for the Y.M.C.A., Service spent his childhood in the Chinese province. By the age of eleven, Service had mastered the local Chinese dialect, and then attended the Shanghai American School
for high school. The Service family moved to California
, where John graduated from Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California
at the age of fifteen. Those who knew him say he always went by "Jack" and he never used his middle name.
In the fall of 1927, Service entered Oberlin College
. He majored in both art history
and economics
, and still found time to be captain of the school's cross-country
and track and field
teams. After graduation, Service took and passed the Foreign Service Exam in 1933. In 1977, Oberlin awarded him an honorary degree.
Service was first assigned to a clerkship position in the American consulate in the capital of the Yunnan
province, Kunming
. Two years later, Service was promoted to Foreign Service Officer
and sent to Beijing
for language study. In 1938, he was assigned to the Shanghai Consulate General under Clarence E. Gauss
. When Gauss was promoted to ambassador, he made Service Third Secretary of the American Embassy at Chungking. As time progressed, Service was eventually promoted to Second Secretary.
During the early war years, Service wrote increasingly critically harsh reports on the Kuomintang
and Chiang Kai-shek
. Service criticized the Nationalist government as "fascist," "undemocratic," and "feudal,". This caught the attention of John P. Davies
, a Foreign Service Officer working as a diplomatic attaché to General Joseph Stilwell
. In the summer of 1943, Davies managed to have Service, among two others, assigned to him to assist him in his duties. When the U.S. Army Observation Group
, also known as the Dixie Mission
, was formed to travel to the Communist territory, Davies selected John Service to be the first State Department official to visit the region.
, the capital of the Communist Party of China
, on July 22, 1944. There Service met and interviewed many of the top leaders of the CPC
, such as Mao Zedong
and Zhou Enlai
. Service wrote many reports over the next four months that praised the CPC, and described its leaders as "progressive" and "democratic." Once, Service wrote that "The Communists are in China to stay and China's destiny is not Chiang's but theirs." He continued to criticize the Nationalists or KMT under Chiang Kai-shek as corrupt and incompetent in writing. Service and the other American political officers eventually advocated a policy of support for the CPC as well as the Nationalists. They believed a civil war was inevitable and that the CPC would triumph. If the U.S. supported the CPC in a coalition with the nationalists, they felt, the U.S. could steer the communists out of the Soviet orbit, where they might be pushed if antagonized by the United States.
The new U.S. Ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley
, also tried to bring unity between the communists and the nationalists, but he failed to understand the political dynamic that caused the rift between the two parties, who would later become the two Chinas. Hurley initially acceped a five-point plan that would have brought the communists into a power-sharing arrangement with the nationalists. Chiang rejected this plan and countered with a three-point plan that would leave the communists with no real power in a government run by Chiang and his supporters. Hurley came to support Chiang's view exclusively. For whatever reason, he sabotaged reasonable efforts to bring the two parties together. He rejected the recommendations of Service and the other Foreign Service officers to accept the growing power of the communists and to accommodate this power. Hurley's exclusive support for the Nationalists, his paranoia and hostility to the professional diplomats in China, and his general incompetence were largely responsible for the diplomatic failures in China during this period. But Hurley decided to have Service and the rest of the political officers recalled from China. Hurley later blamed them for U.S. diplomatic failures in China. He also tried to destroy Service professionally later on, and though he always wrote critically of Service, Hurley always refused to publicly testify against him.
Case. He was accused of passing confidential U.S. materials from his time in China to the editors of the Amerasia
magazine. Service was later cleared of the charges, but five years later he was dismissed from the State Department after Joseph McCarthy
accused him of being a Communist. The former Foreign Service officer challenged the dismissal in court. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor, and he was reinstated at the State Department. In between his initial legal success in the Amerasia matter in 1945 and his dismissal in 1950, Service had three overseas assignments. He was briefly posted to Douglas MacArthur's staff in Tokyo. He served in New Zealand from October 1946 through early 1949. Finally, he was assigned to India, but he never made it to the post with his family. In March 1950, he was ordered from his ship docked in Yokohama to return to Washington, where he would answer charges leveled against him.
In D.C., FBI surveillance recorded that Service met with Amerasia
editor Philip Jaffe on April 19, 1945 at D.C.'s Statler Hotel: "Service, according to the microphone surveillance, apparently gave Jaffe a document which dealt with matters the Chinese had furnished to the United States government in confidence."
In China, Service had established a reputation for meeting with Communists, reporters, and anyone who might provide information for his duty. Former ambassador to China, Clarence Gauss testified later during the McCarthy era:
Service had numerous meetings with Jaffe, ignorant of the ongoing investigation of the editor. Adrian Fisher, the senior legal officer at the State Department at the time, later commented, "It was like a scene out of Heaven's My Destination. Jack Service went into a bawdy house thinking it was still a girls' boarding school."
Eventually FBI investigators broke into in the offices of Amerasia
, and found hundreds of government documents, many labeled "secret," "top secret," or "confidential," Service was arrested as a suspect.
None of the documents Service gave Jaffe were classified; the documents the government found with various labels of classification were given to Jaffe by others. Nevertheless, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
wrote that he thought he had an "airtight case" against Service.
However, when the Justice Department submitted its evidence to a Federal Grand Jury, they elected to indict Jaffe, but refused to indict Service by a vote of 20 - 0.
Service was subject to loyalty and security hearings every year from 1946 to 1951, with the exception of 1948. In each hearing, he was cleared of disloyalty or other wrongdoing.
Five years after Amerasia, on March 14, Senator Joseph McCarthy
accused Service of being a Communist sympathizer in the State Department. Service was cleared of the charges by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, also known as the Tydings Committee
. However, a final review board found "reasonable doubt" as to Service's loyalty, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson ordered his dismissal. In the "red scare
" turmoil of the early 1950s, John P. Davies, and other diplomats became scapegoats for the fall of China to the Communists, and were forced out of the State Department.
Beginning in 1952, Service appealed his dismissal from the State Department. He found it very hard to find work, but he was eventually hired by Sarco International, a steam trap company. As with all the positions Service held over the years, he was highly successful at Sarco. In 1955, Clement Wells, the owner who had hired Service, appointed him president of the company. Meanwhile, Service's case eventually came to the Supreme Court
, which ruled in his favor unanimously. The Court held that Service's dismissal violated U.S. State Department procedures because the State Department's Loyalty Security Board found no evidence of Service being disloyal or a security risk.
In The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism, authors Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh state “[a]ny lingering doubts about Service’s true position are erased by the evidence of the FBI surveillance. If he had been a secret Communist, much less a spy, some better evidence would likely have surfaced in the transcripts”.
--"but without the associated title or pay grade". Though Service continued to get excellent performance reviews in every position he held, the State Department refused to promote him. He reluctantly retired in 1962 and pursued a Master of Arts
degree in political science
at the University of California, Berkeley
. After earning his degree, Service worked as library curator for the school's Center for Chinese Studies into the 1970s, and then served as editor for the center's publications.
In 1971, preceding President Nixon's visit to China, Service was one of a handful of Americans invited back to the country, as relations with the U.S. were normalized. He met with Zhou Enlai again during his visit, and he and his wife Caroline appeared on the cover of Parade Magazine.
in 1946, Service had predicted that the CPC would prevail, thanks to their ability to stamp out corruption, gain popular support, and to organize grass root organizations. The scenarios that Service envisioned in his reports from Dixie Mission about CPC's future management of China were rose-colored, or incomplete. Mao's implementation of his economic plans was harsh, and pointless since they were unsuccessful. Service hoped that the CPC would adopt free market and democratic reforms if they were pushed in the right direction, with U.S. support. Later, Service wrote that he believed an American relationship with the CPC might have prevented the Korean War
and Vietnam War
, or lessened their gravity.
It is difficult to say whether the United States would have been able to foster reform or restraint had the U.S. engaged the Communists in 1944-45, as was recommended by Service. It also entirely unclear whether U.S. recognition of Communist China in 1949 would have changed Mao's conduct toward his own people or toward the United States. But since the recommendations of Service and others were rejected, it is unfair to blame them for the 'loss of China', CPC's takeover of China, or the events that occurred in the following decades.
United States Foreign Service
The United States Foreign Service is a component of the United States federal government under the aegis of the United States Department of State. It consists of approximately 11,500 professionals carrying out the foreign policy of the United States and aiding U.S...
in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
prior to and during the World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. Considered one of the State Department's "China Hands
China Hands
The term China Hand originally referred to 19th-century merchants in the treaty ports of China, but evolved to reflect anyone with expert knowledge of the language, culture, and people of China...
," he was an important member of the Dixie Mission
Dixie Mission
The United States Army Observation Group, commonly known as the Dixie Mission, was the first U.S. effort to establish official relations with the Communist Party of China and the People's Liberation Army, then headquartered in the mountainous city of Yan'an...
to Yan'an
Yan'an
Yan'an , is a prefecture-level city in the Shanbei region of Shaanxi province in China, administering several counties, including Zhidan County , which served as the Chinese communist capital before the city of Yan'an proper took that role....
. Service correctly predicted that the Communists would defeat the Nationalists in a civil war, but he and other diplomats were blamed for the "loss" of China in the domestic political turmoil following the 1949 Communist triumph in China. In the immediate postwar years, Service was accused in the Amerasia Affair
Amerasia
Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.-Publication:...
in 1945, of which a Grand Jury cleared him of wrongdoing.
In 1950 U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an attack against Service, which led to investigations of the reports Service wrote while stationed in China. Secretary of State Dean Acheson fired Service, but in 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered his reinstatement in a unanimous decision.
Early life
John Service was born in the city of ChengduChengdu
Chengdu , formerly transliterated Chengtu, is the capital of Sichuan province in Southwest China. It holds sub-provincial administrative status...
in the Sichuan
Sichuan
' , known formerly in the West by its postal map spellings of Szechwan or Szechuan is a province in Southwest China with its capital in Chengdu...
province of China, on August 3, 1909. The son of missionaries working for the Y.M.C.A., Service spent his childhood in the Chinese province. By the age of eleven, Service had mastered the local Chinese dialect, and then attended the Shanghai American School
Shanghai American School
Shanghai American School is an international K-12 school located in Shanghai, China. Originally established in 1912, it accepts expatriate students from all countries around the world, and fosters them with an American educational environment.-Present:...
for high school. The Service family moved to California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, where John graduated from Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
at the age of fifteen. Those who knew him say he always went by "Jack" and he never used his middle name.
In the fall of 1927, Service entered Oberlin College
Oberlin College
Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating...
. He majored in both art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
and economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
, and still found time to be captain of the school's cross-country
Cross country running
Cross country running is a sport in which people run a race on open-air courses over natural terrain. The course, typically long, may include surfaces of grass and earth, pass through woodlands and open country, and include hills, flat ground and sometimes gravel road...
and track and field
Track and field
Track and field is a sport comprising various competitive athletic contests based around the activities of running, jumping and throwing. The name of the sport derives from the venue for the competitions: a stadium which features an oval running track surrounding a grassy area...
teams. After graduation, Service took and passed the Foreign Service Exam in 1933. In 1977, Oberlin awarded him an honorary degree.
Career in China
Yunnan
Yunnan is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the far southwest of the country spanning approximately and with a population of 45.7 million . The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders Burma, Laos, and Vietnam.Yunnan is situated in a mountainous area, with...
province, Kunming
Kunming
' is the capital and largest city of Yunnan Province in Southwest China. It was known as Yunnan-Fou until the 1920s. A prefecture-level city, it is the political, economic, communications and cultural centre of Yunnan, and is the seat of the provincial government...
. Two years later, Service was promoted to Foreign Service Officer
Foreign Service Officer
A Foreign Service Officer is a commissioned member of the United States Foreign Service. As diplomats, Foreign Service Officers formulate and implement the foreign policy of the United States. FSOs spend most of their careers overseas as members of U.S. embassies, consulates, and other diplomatic...
and sent to Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
for language study. In 1938, he was assigned to the Shanghai Consulate General under Clarence E. Gauss
Clarence E. Gauss
Clarence Edward Gauss was an American diplomat. Gauss was born in Washington, D.C., as the son of Herman Gauss and Emile J. Gauss. He married Rebecca Louise Barker in 1917. He was a Republican and a Protestant....
. When Gauss was promoted to ambassador, he made Service Third Secretary of the American Embassy at Chungking. As time progressed, Service was eventually promoted to Second Secretary.
During the early war years, Service wrote increasingly critically harsh reports on the Kuomintang
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...
and Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
. Service criticized the Nationalist government as "fascist," "undemocratic," and "feudal,". This caught the attention of John P. Davies
John P. Davies
John Paton Davies, Jr. was an American diplomat and Medal of Freedom recipient. He was one of the China Hands, whose careers in the Foreign Service were destroyed by McCarthyism and the reaction to the fall of China....
, a Foreign Service Officer working as a diplomatic attaché to General Joseph Stilwell
Joseph Stilwell
General Joseph Warren Stilwell was a United States Army four-star General known for service in the China Burma India Theater. His caustic personality was reflected in the nickname "Vinegar Joe"...
. In the summer of 1943, Davies managed to have Service, among two others, assigned to him to assist him in his duties. When the U.S. Army Observation Group
Dixie Mission
The United States Army Observation Group, commonly known as the Dixie Mission, was the first U.S. effort to establish official relations with the Communist Party of China and the People's Liberation Army, then headquartered in the mountainous city of Yan'an...
, also known as the Dixie Mission
Dixie Mission
The United States Army Observation Group, commonly known as the Dixie Mission, was the first U.S. effort to establish official relations with the Communist Party of China and the People's Liberation Army, then headquartered in the mountainous city of Yan'an...
, was formed to travel to the Communist territory, Davies selected John Service to be the first State Department official to visit the region.
The Dixie Mission and Yan'an
John Service arrived in Yan'anYan'an
Yan'an , is a prefecture-level city in the Shanbei region of Shaanxi province in China, administering several counties, including Zhidan County , which served as the Chinese communist capital before the city of Yan'an proper took that role....
, the capital of the Communist Party of China
Communist Party of China
The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
, on July 22, 1944. There Service met and interviewed many of the top leaders of the CPC
Communist Party of China
The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
, such as Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
and Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976...
. Service wrote many reports over the next four months that praised the CPC, and described its leaders as "progressive" and "democratic." Once, Service wrote that "The Communists are in China to stay and China's destiny is not Chiang's but theirs." He continued to criticize the Nationalists or KMT under Chiang Kai-shek as corrupt and incompetent in writing. Service and the other American political officers eventually advocated a policy of support for the CPC as well as the Nationalists. They believed a civil war was inevitable and that the CPC would triumph. If the U.S. supported the CPC in a coalition with the nationalists, they felt, the U.S. could steer the communists out of the Soviet orbit, where they might be pushed if antagonized by the United States.
The new U.S. Ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley
Patrick J. Hurley
Patrick Jay Hurley was an American soldier, statesman, and diplomat....
, also tried to bring unity between the communists and the nationalists, but he failed to understand the political dynamic that caused the rift between the two parties, who would later become the two Chinas. Hurley initially acceped a five-point plan that would have brought the communists into a power-sharing arrangement with the nationalists. Chiang rejected this plan and countered with a three-point plan that would leave the communists with no real power in a government run by Chiang and his supporters. Hurley came to support Chiang's view exclusively. For whatever reason, he sabotaged reasonable efforts to bring the two parties together. He rejected the recommendations of Service and the other Foreign Service officers to accept the growing power of the communists and to accommodate this power. Hurley's exclusive support for the Nationalists, his paranoia and hostility to the professional diplomats in China, and his general incompetence were largely responsible for the diplomatic failures in China during this period. But Hurley decided to have Service and the rest of the political officers recalled from China. Hurley later blamed them for U.S. diplomatic failures in China. He also tried to destroy Service professionally later on, and though he always wrote critically of Service, Hurley always refused to publicly testify against him.
Post China career
John Service returned to Washington in 1945, and was soon arrested as a suspect in the AmerasiaAmerasia
Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.-Publication:...
Case. He was accused of passing confidential U.S. materials from his time in China to the editors of the Amerasia
Amerasia
Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.-Publication:...
magazine. Service was later cleared of the charges, but five years later he was dismissed from the State Department after Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
accused him of being a Communist. The former Foreign Service officer challenged the dismissal in court. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor, and he was reinstated at the State Department. In between his initial legal success in the Amerasia matter in 1945 and his dismissal in 1950, Service had three overseas assignments. He was briefly posted to Douglas MacArthur's staff in Tokyo. He served in New Zealand from October 1946 through early 1949. Finally, he was assigned to India, but he never made it to the post with his family. In March 1950, he was ordered from his ship docked in Yokohama to return to Washington, where he would answer charges leveled against him.
Disloyalty charges
Amerasia
Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.-Publication:...
editor Philip Jaffe on April 19, 1945 at D.C.'s Statler Hotel: "Service, according to the microphone surveillance, apparently gave Jaffe a document which dealt with matters the Chinese had furnished to the United States government in confidence."
In China, Service had established a reputation for meeting with Communists, reporters, and anyone who might provide information for his duty. Former ambassador to China, Clarence Gauss testified later during the McCarthy era:
"In Chungking, Mr. Service was a political officer of the Embassy...His job was to get every bit of information that he possibly could...he would see the foreign press people. He saw the Chinese press people. He saw anybody in any of the embassies or legations that were over there that were supposed to know anything...He went to the Kuomintang headquarters...he went to the Communist headquarters. He associated with everybody and anybody in Chungking that could give him information, and he pieced together this puzzle that we had constantly before us as to what was going on in China and he did a magnificent job at it."
Service had numerous meetings with Jaffe, ignorant of the ongoing investigation of the editor. Adrian Fisher, the senior legal officer at the State Department at the time, later commented, "It was like a scene out of Heaven's My Destination. Jack Service went into a bawdy house thinking it was still a girls' boarding school."
Eventually FBI investigators broke into in the offices of Amerasia
Amerasia
Amerasia was a journal of Far Eastern affairs best known for the 1940s "Amerasia Affair" in which several of its staff and their contacts were suspected of espionage and charged with unauthorized possession of government documents.-Publication:...
, and found hundreds of government documents, many labeled "secret," "top secret," or "confidential," Service was arrested as a suspect.
None of the documents Service gave Jaffe were classified; the documents the government found with various labels of classification were given to Jaffe by others. Nevertheless, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
wrote that he thought he had an "airtight case" against Service.
However, when the Justice Department submitted its evidence to a Federal Grand Jury, they elected to indict Jaffe, but refused to indict Service by a vote of 20 - 0.
Service was subject to loyalty and security hearings every year from 1946 to 1951, with the exception of 1948. In each hearing, he was cleared of disloyalty or other wrongdoing.
Five years after Amerasia, on March 14, Senator Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
accused Service of being a Communist sympathizer in the State Department. Service was cleared of the charges by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, also known as the Tydings Committee
Tydings Committee
The Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, more commonly referred to as the Tydings Committee, was a subcommittee authorized by in February 1950 to look into charges by Joseph R...
. However, a final review board found "reasonable doubt" as to Service's loyalty, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson ordered his dismissal. In the "red scare
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
" turmoil of the early 1950s, John P. Davies, and other diplomats became scapegoats for the fall of China to the Communists, and were forced out of the State Department.
Beginning in 1952, Service appealed his dismissal from the State Department. He found it very hard to find work, but he was eventually hired by Sarco International, a steam trap company. As with all the positions Service held over the years, he was highly successful at Sarco. In 1955, Clement Wells, the owner who had hired Service, appointed him president of the company. Meanwhile, Service's case eventually came to the Supreme Court
Supreme court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of many legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, instance court, judgment court, high court, or apex court...
, which ruled in his favor unanimously. The Court held that Service's dismissal violated U.S. State Department procedures because the State Department's Loyalty Security Board found no evidence of Service being disloyal or a security risk.
In The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism, authors Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh state “[a]ny lingering doubts about Service’s true position are erased by the evidence of the FBI surveillance. If he had been a secret Communist, much less a spy, some better evidence would likely have surfaced in the transcripts”.
Return to the State Department
Service returned to active duty in the State Department in 1957. First, he was assigned to State's transportation division. In 1959, he was given a security clearance after a new, lengthy internal hearing. Undersecretary of state for administration Loy Henderson approved the clearance but noted that Service's "action in the Amerasia case was reprehensible and has brought serious discredit upon the Foreign Service..." Henderson's qualifed approval allowed Service to continue his career but prevented him from ever being promoted again. To avoid a Senate fight over a Service confirmation, the State Department decided to assign Service to head the consulate in LiverpoolConsulate of the United States in Liverpool
The United States Consulate in Liverpool, England was established in 1790, and was the first overseas consulate founded by the then fledgling United States of America. Liverpool was at the time an important center for transatlantic commerce and a vital trading partner for the former Thirteen...
--"but without the associated title or pay grade". Though Service continued to get excellent performance reviews in every position he held, the State Department refused to promote him. He reluctantly retired in 1962 and pursued a Master of Arts
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
degree in political science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. After earning his degree, Service worked as library curator for the school's Center for Chinese Studies into the 1970s, and then served as editor for the center's publications.
In 1971, preceding President Nixon's visit to China, Service was one of a handful of Americans invited back to the country, as relations with the U.S. were normalized. He met with Zhou Enlai again during his visit, and he and his wife Caroline appeared on the cover of Parade Magazine.
Legacy
The two main themes of Service's reporting were that (1) the nationalists were incompetent and likely to lose in a power struggle with the CPC, and that (2) the CPC seemed to be worthy successors with whom the U.S. should try to establish relations. Most commentators, even those critical of Mao, agree with Service's appraisal of the nationalists. Prior to the outbreak of the Chinese Civil WarChinese Civil War
The Chinese Civil War was a civil war fought between the Kuomintang , the governing party of the Republic of China, and the Communist Party of China , for the control of China which eventually led to China's division into two Chinas, Republic of China and People's Republic of...
in 1946, Service had predicted that the CPC would prevail, thanks to their ability to stamp out corruption, gain popular support, and to organize grass root organizations. The scenarios that Service envisioned in his reports from Dixie Mission about CPC's future management of China were rose-colored, or incomplete. Mao's implementation of his economic plans was harsh, and pointless since they were unsuccessful. Service hoped that the CPC would adopt free market and democratic reforms if they were pushed in the right direction, with U.S. support. Later, Service wrote that he believed an American relationship with the CPC might have prevented the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
and Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, or lessened their gravity.
It is difficult to say whether the United States would have been able to foster reform or restraint had the U.S. engaged the Communists in 1944-45, as was recommended by Service. It also entirely unclear whether U.S. recognition of Communist China in 1949 would have changed Mao's conduct toward his own people or toward the United States. But since the recommendations of Service and others were rejected, it is unfair to blame them for the 'loss of China', CPC's takeover of China, or the events that occurred in the following decades.
External links
- Interview with John S. Service , 1977 (The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project)
- FBI recording summary, May 31, 1950: Philip Jacob Jaffe, June 10, 1945-April 19, 1946 (with cover memorandum, Ladd to Hoover, June 30, 1952)
- An obituary for John Service
- Photo of Service in his later years
- Oberlin College biography of John Service and spouse.
- A short biography of Service.
- Interview of John Service by CNN.
- http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-6/service1.htmlExtended Interview hosted at George Washington UniversityGeorge Washington UniversityThe George Washington University is a private, coeducational comprehensive university located in Washington, D.C. in the United States...
.] - Guide to the John S. Service papers at The Bancroft Library
- John Stewart Service and Charles Edward Rhetts Papers. Truman Presidential Museum and Library
- Oral History transcript, Caroline Service, 1976