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I never had the good fortune to meet John Paton Davies, Jr. But I made his inspiring acquaintance, all the same, in the summer of 1979, thanks to a pair of remarkable books. The first was Eric Sevareid’s then recently reissued 1946 memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, which recounted the harrowing story of his and Davies’s forced bail-out from a crippled American transport plane into the welcoming arms of a jungle tribe of headhunters along the Burma-India border in World War II. And the second was The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them, a gripping account by E. J. Kahn, Jr., a veteran staff writer for the New Yorker, of the perverse way Davies and his diplomatic colleagues in China in the 1940s were punished for being right: by predicting the eventual victory of Mao Zedong’s Communists over Chiang Kai-shek’s tired and corrupt Nationalist regime.

I thought, then, as an undergraduate, that Davies’s story was a boy’s adventure come-to-life—especially if the boy in question happened to be a sensitive soul from a solid family, a straight-arrow good student, a keen observer of human nature, and a very good writer. I think all that, still (and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas would do well to take note of the tale that unfolds in the following pages). What I now also know—after a close reading of this elegant, if tantalizingly reticent and incomplete memoir—is that Davies was one of the indispensable Americans of the “Greatest Generation,” and his story is all the more compelling because he was largely (though not entirely) deprived of adequate public recognition in his long, rich lifetime.

His memoir is a whirlwind, globe-girdling “Who’s Who” of the middle fifty years of the twentieth century. He was born to American Baptist missionary parents in Szechuan, China, in the last months of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, and he died in Asheville, North Carolina, in the aftermath of Bill Clinton’s acquittal on impeachment charges. In between, he worked with, tangled with, or merely brushed up against, a dizzying array of the most fascinating figures of his time. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin, at Yenching University near Beijing, and, finally, at Columbia University in New York, where, if he had been slightly more athletic (or more interested in beetles), he might well have become personal tutor to the teenage David Rockefeller. Instead, he took a job as a dishwasher and decided to apply for the Foreign Service.

In his first postings, in China, in the early 1930s, he experienced the sleepy, seat-of-the-pants diplomacy that prevailed in the age before the American Imperium, then witnessed the steadily gathering storm of World War II, from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on through Pearl Harbor and his service as special diplomatic attaché to General Joseph W. Stilwell, commander of the Allied China-Burma-India theater, and frustrated chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. From this perch, Davies met, and took the measure of, legendary figures, from Gandhi to Nehru, Franklin D. Roosevelt, General George C. Marshall, Wendell Willkie, Lord Mountbatten—even Noel Coward and Frank Capra. At the height of World War II, Davies learned, from no less an authoritative source than the American spymaster William “Wild Bill” Donovan himself, the shocking news that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was gay. When Davies’s plane crashed over the jungle as he was bound from India for China in 1943, he was carrying a rare bottle of cognac and some special brown ink as a gift for Madame Sun-Yat-sen, widow of the father of Nationalist China. Later, on the staff of Ambassador W. Averell Harriman at the American Embassy in Moscow, he would have cause to observe Joseph Stalin at close range. George F. Kennan, the titan of postwar American diplomacy, was Davies’s close colleague and friend, and besides Sevareid he numbered among his journalist friends the giants of the age, including Theodore H. White and David Halberstam, who wrote at length about Davies’s contributions and ordeal in The Best and the Brightest.

That was the kind of A-list life Davies led. But in this memoir, drawn heavily from his voluminous personal letters and journals, as well as from the formal “white papers” and reports he prepared for his State Department and military superiors, he is never the hero of his own life, however heroic his deeds sometimes are. Rather, he is the perpetually detached, wry, knowing observer, with an elegant turn of phrase or a touch of whimsy seemingly always at his fingertips. On a hair-raising ride in the engineer’s cab of an Indian mail train, he marvels that the front of the engine “wasn’t plastered with sirloins and spareribs,” so prevalent were wandering sacred cows along the track. He decides that “dignified friendliness” is the only proper approach to the Naga headhunters who welcome his and Sevareid’s party. He sums up Chiang Kai-shek as an “aloofly gracious soldier-statesman-Methodist-sage of the East.” He writes, discreetly, but with unbounded love, of the “matchless young woman,” Patricia Grady, with whom he would make a happy marriage of fifty-seven years, and raise seven children.

Again and again, Davies’s judgments in these pages are uncannily prescient. He foresaw the difficulties for the Allied war effort of Britain’s lingering imperialist posture. He understood, as he put it at one point before the end of the war, that “the Communists are in China to stay, and China’s destiny is not Chiang’s, but theirs.” He realized, as early as 1943, assessing the volatile prospects for postwar international relations, “that we can now be assured of further war and revolution in our time,” thereby envisioning what John F. Kennedy would later call “the long, twilight struggle” of the Cold War.

It was the great tragedy of Davies’s life—and the searing cautionary crux of this book—that in the most parlous of those times, John Paton Davies’s country was deprived of his services, not because he was ever determined to be disloyal, but because after nine successive internal security reviews prompted by the McCarthy-era hysteria that swept the country beginning in 1950, a State Department Loyalty Security Board at last concluded that he lacked “judgment, discretion and reliability,” the very three characteristics he possessed in full measure. What he really lacked, of course, was timorous conformity with the prevailing demands of domestic American politics in an age of fear. He was informed of this indictment in November 1954 by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who promptly undermined the credibility of the findings by offering to provide a character reference should Davies ever need one. It is the bitterest of ironies that Davies’s dismissal came less than a month before the downfall and censure by his Senate peers of Joseph McCarthy himself, and just six months after the defeat of French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu—thus robbing the State Department of one of its most distinguished Asia experts in the very years when his presence might have mattered most to the wise conduct of foreign policy in Vietnam.

Davies writes tersely of these developments in this manuscript, which he began in Spain in 1972 and labored over reluctantly for more than twenty years before putting it aside, still unfinished. Though he had published two other books in his post-Foreign Service years—Foreign and Other Affairs in 1964, a collection of essays, and, in 1972, Dragon by the Tail, a history of Chinese-American relations in the 1930s and 1940s—he put off telling his own story. “As he got closer and closer to the unpleasantness,” his daughter Tiki told me, “he slowed down and slowed down and slowed down.” How lucky for us that he did not stop completely. Our own moment in history is different from Davies’s, but similarly tumultuous. We hear the mayor of New York declare that among some members of Congress, “nobody knows what China is,” and the Senate Republican leader seems determined to prove him right, when asked for his view of U.S. policy toward China, by replying, “I don’t really have any observation about that.” In such times, Davies’s gentle but bracing erudition—on China and so many other subjects—arrives as a tonic.

Like so many great figures under-appreciated in their own times, Davies came to grief at the hands of smaller men than he. But he lived long enough to see his views vindicated and his reputation restored, and long enough, too, to hear his old friend Sevareid, that most unsentimental of Norsemen, declare that while he had “known a great number of men,” he had never known one “who seemed more the whole man . . . in all that a man should be, in modesty and thoughtfulness, in resourcefulness and steady strength of character” than Davies. What a gift that a new generation can now come to know this rare man all over again, here, in his own words.