Читать книгу China Hand - John Paton Davies Jr. - Страница 7

At 2:30 p.m. on November 5, 1954, I walked into the lofty office of the Secretary of State and there, waiting for me, stood John Foster Dulles. Alongside the tall, stooped Secretary was Herman Phleger, his Legal Adviser.

The last time I had seen Dulles was in Moscow. As a gesture of bipartisanship, the Truman administration had included him as a Republican in the American delegation to the 1947 Foreign Ministers’ conference there. I was then a First Secretary of the American Embassy. He dined affably with my wife and me, she took him shopping for souvenirs, and he had us to dinner at one of Moscow’s less awful restaurants. Now he was presiding over the Department of State in the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

On orders from the Department, I had arrived in Washington on November 3 from Lima, Peru, where I was Deputy Chief of Mission at the American Embassy. The change was not simply hemispheric, nor from spring to autumn, nor from one culture to another. It was also from an atmosphere of placidity to one of anxiety, rancid with suspicion.

What I sensed was not a new development. The American people’s post-World War II disillusionments and their fears of the Russians, the Chinese, the bomb, and an eerie new phenomenon in American life— Communist subversion—had been inflated and exploited by a relatively few politicians, publicists and military men for nearly nine years. In the late 1940s the party out of power—the Republican—discovered that accusing the Democrats of losing China and tolerating a Communist conspiracy in the government was their best chance of winning public support and taking over the government.

The demagogues and political vigilantes directed their assault primarily at the State Department, and most viciously against some of those Foreign Service officers who were China specialists and had dealt with Chinese Communists. These diplomats, of whom I was one, were made out to be part of a ramified plot that had delivered China to Communism. Senator Joseph McCarthy went so far as to accuse the then Secretary of State Dean Acheson and General George C. Marshall of heading this conspiracy.

The demagoguery had its effect on a befuddled public and contributed to the election of Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon to “clean up the mess in Washington.” This included widening the criteria for firing civil servants from reasonable doubt of loyalty or security or anything tending to indicate that a man was not reliable, a remarkably pliant measure of character. A man pronounced as deficient in reliability was categorized, not as disloyal, but with the scarcely less sinister designation of “security risk.” My colleague John Carter Vincent had been forced into disgraced retirement by Dulles on the grounds that Vincent’s professional performance had not been up to an undefined standard—notwithstanding the contrary judgment of preceding Secretaries of State.

The coming to power of the Republicans and the broadening of the purge did not placate all of the agitators. For example, McCarthy on November 24, 1953 declared that in my case the Eisenhower administration’s “batting average is zero,” “struck out,” for I was still on the government rolls. The White House staff regarded this as an attack on the President, but the beloved and mighty Ike remained mute. So did Dulles, who, for a man of prominent principles, was less than dauntless in his relations with the political vigilantes.

In June 1954, I was summoned from Lima to the Department to appear at a hearing before a specially selected Loyalty Security Board. This was the ninth formal scrutiny of my loyalty and security; the first was in 1949. In July I returned to Lima, where I awaited word of the Board’s findings. Then in October, with no word from the Board, I received orders to proceed to Washington.

Meanwhile, the time was approaching for the selection of those Foreign Service officers to be promoted. The efficiency reports on me were such that I was qualified for promotion to chief of mission. So when I arrived in Washington on November 3, I did not know whether I would be fired or asked which vacant Embassy I would like to preside over.

As I approached Dulles and Phleger on that afternoon in 1954, I observed that they were solemn, almost mournful of countenance. It was as if I were being met by two ushers waiting to conduct the bereaved to his pew. Their stance, however, suggested something less accommodating. They had planted themselves only a short distance inside the office and it immediately became evident that while I might receive condolences, I was not going to be invited to proceed further and sit down.

Dulles and Phleger began by invoking their acquaintance with and esteem for my parents-in-law, Henry and Lucretia Grady. The Secretary added that he also knew and held in high regard my cousin, Richard L. Davies, a fellow Presbyterian layman. Having established a rapport of sorts, Dulles turned to the matter at hand. It was a hard thing for him to do, he said, but he had to do it. The Loyalty Security Board had concluded that I was not a Communist or otherwise disloyal, but that I was lacking in judgment, discretion, and reliability. I must therefore be, in government genteelism, “separated” from the Service, i.e., fired.

Obviously, this was neither the time nor the place to argue subjective appraisals of intangible qualities in my personality, but I did want clarification on two points. I asked if my indiscretion, as Dulles had put it, referred to the period of my service in China. Yes. Any indiscretions later? He said that he could not think of any. Did he agree with the Board’s finding, I asked Dulles. Without ring of conviction he said yes.

Well, that was that. So I bade the two men goodbye and went directly to the Department’s press room. There newsmen were milling about querying Lincoln White, the Department’s spokesman, about a release he had just handed them announcing my dismissal. The correspondents, with some of whom I was acquainted, clamored to know what I had to say. From my pocket I drew several copies of a statement and passed them out. Having thus distracted attention from myself, I walked briskly out of the building.

My statement read:

Naturally, I cannot say that I am happy about the Secretary’s decision. Nor can I say that I feel that there are adequate grounds for such a judgment. But the Secretary of State has more important problems on his hands than the reputation and future of one civil servant.

As a professional diplomat of some 33 years’ standing, I am perhaps more aware than most of the magnitude of his problems. And with this awareness comes a determination not to add to them.

There has been enough recrimination. I am not prepared to add to it and thereby detract from the strength of my country and its mortal struggle with the Communist enemy.

So I shall not contest the Secretary’s decision or seek to compare my record with those of others. I must be content to let history be my judge. And to that end I have informed the Secretary that I would, personally, welcome the release to the public of the whole record of my case, including my 1950 recommendation that we seek a preventive showdown with the Soviet Union.

I can hope that my departure from its ranks will add to the American people’s confidence in their Foreign Service, which has been so unjustly undermined. If this is the practical result of my separation, I can have no real regrets over what is for me, personally, a melancholy outcome.

I had prepared this statement in Lima, with the help of my wife, Patricia, to have ready should the decision go against me. It was clear that I would have to yield to an adverse decision by the Secretary, as his ruling was final and there was no feasible way to fight it. Furthermore, I was confident that when the aberrations then seizing the country had passed, I would be vindicated.

My wife and I had also discussed what I should do were I to be given the choice of resigning rather than being fired. Resignation would have meant less public and categoric disgrace, and less dismal prospects of getting a job. But I decided against resigning. The issues should not be fuzzed and evaded. If Dulles and company wanted to be rid of me, it was for them to act and give their reasons. I should not, in a vain and desperate effort to escape disgrace, flee through the back door of resignation, thus giving Dulles what he wanted—riddance of me—without having to take responsibility for my departure.

It was not until a few hours before Dulles fired me that I knew what the decision would be. Robert Murphy, Deputy Under Secretary of State, and the senior career officer in the Department, had asked me to come to his office. He was a careful, conciliatory and warm-hearted man who had been Eisenhower’s Political Adviser in World War II. Murphy had tears in his eyes as he told me that the Board’s decision was negative, and was upheld by the Secretary.

“Bob, who was not informed until last evening,” I wrote Patricia in Lima,

said that I had the opportunity to resign if I wished. I said I preferred to face the music. So there we are. I am now waiting to be called, possibly by the Secretary—if he wishes to talk to me. And of course there will be the press boys. I am quite calm and shall endeavor to continue so. You will read about it in the papers.

Now what we do. You sit tight. And I shall take this business step by step, day by day until the hullabaloo dies down. Then I’ll think about job hunting. One thing at a time.

Keep your chin up, darling. I know how hard this is for you. But we’re beginning a new and, I trust, happier and freer life. That is the side I look on.