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.
CHAPTER I
THE FIRING
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
