Some things never die: the Creature from the Black Lagoon, underground coal fires, partisan gridlock in the US Congress. Add another to the list: charges that John Stewart Service was disloyal to the US as a Foreign Service Officer. In her new book, the journalist Lynne Joiner (also a confidant of Service and his wife, Caroline) weaves together the strands of Jack Service's personal and professional life. Though ultimately a vindication, Joiner is neither naïve nor uncritical toward her subject. Sources concerning Jack Service, the Amerasia case and the McCarthy era are extensive, but no other work tells us nearly so much about Jack Service's personality and principles, about what got him into so much difficulty and enabled him to survive such a long and searing ordeal psychically intact. These traits were largely one and the same: a steely resolve that sustained him but sometimes led him to be headstrong and wilful, perhaps too trusting of his instincts, too willing to push conventional boundaries. These traits showed up at crucial moments in both his professional career and his personal life, for example in his long relationship with Val Chao, a Chinese singer and actress, which endangered his marriage and complicated his claims of innocence.
Service was born in 1909 and raised in Chengdu to a family of YMCA organizers. After schooling in China, he attended Oberlin College, where he met Caroline. They were married and he returned to China as a junior Foreign Service officer in 1933. For more than a decade, Service was assigned to various posts using his remarkable language skills and knowledge of China.
The centrepiece of his China experience – and the source of much of his subsequent trouble – was his four-month participation in the “Dixie Mission,” the US observer group which arrived in Yan'an in July 1944, after finally securing Chiang Kai-shek's grudging permission. Service was granted extraordinary access to Mao Zedong and other Chinese communist leaders, from whom he received a highly favourable impression of the CCP's wartime accomplishments, their promises of co-operation, and their views – tailored to American values – of Chinese and world affairs. Service was already disillusioned with the Nationalist government under Chiang and increasingly doubtful of its capacity to prosecute the war and lead China into the post-war era. By contrast, what he saw in Yan'an – and came to believe was authentically representative of the growing strength of the Chinese communist movement – convinced him that the US China policy of exclusive support to Chiang and the Nationalists was in need of thorough re-examination. These views, nominally descriptive but strongly tinged with policy implications, were reflected in his reports up the chain of command.
Adding to the urgency Service felt was the disastrous consequence of President Roosevelt's appointment of Patrick Hurley as his personal emissary and later ambassador. Hurley, whose ignorance of China was exceeded only by his egotism, soon concluded that Service and others had deliberately sabotaged his unrealistic efforts to bring the KMT and the CCP together in a two-party coalition headed by Chiang Kai-shek – he once likened the CCP to Oklahoma Republicans, but with guns. Hurley swore he would ruin those who, he believed, had betrayed him.
By mid-1945, Service was back in Washington and something of a celebrity in those circles with an interest in China. He continued to press for a review of China policy, both within his official capacity, and from time to time outside it as well. As in China, he met with a wide array of journalists, scholars and others. What he did not know was that some of these were under surveillance by the FBI through illegal wiretaps and other means. (A thread running through Joiner's work is J. Edgar Hoover's apparently unchallenged power to secretly gather information on whomever he chose. He is seen often frustrated and infuriated by his inability to enter such “evidence” into public legal processes, both because to do so would compromise his secret operations and because he knew the courts would throw it out.)
In July 1945, the FBI, acting on such information, raided the editorial headquarters of Amerasia, an increasingly left-leaning journal which had spun off from the Institute of Pacific Relations. There, among a larger trove of unauthorized documents in the possession of Philip Jaffe, Amerasia's editor, were personal copies of some of Service's reports. How they got there became a hotly contested issue not fully clear even today; Service acknowledged that some had come from him. Service was arrested and charged with espionage, but with a little help from his friends the Grand Jury voted unanimously against indictment (others in the Amerasia case were indicted).
The firestorm died down but continued to smoulder. After his exoneration, Service was assigned to duty in Japan, New Zealand and Washington, but with the intensification of the Cold War abroad, an increasing anti-communist fever at home, and the uncovering of some real spies and agents, it flared up again, hotter than ever, with Senator Joseph McCarthy leading the charge. Much heat was added by the results of the 1948 elections, one of the great upsets in electoral history, in which an all but assured Republican triumph turned into defeat, as Harry S. Truman was elected with substantial Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The anger and bitterness of this defeat underlay much of the venom of the mainly Republican hunt for Communists, fellow travellers, and pinkos in government, academia, the media, Hollywood. In much of this, John Stewart Service was the poster boy for those said to be responsible for the loss of China.
From 1946 to 1951, Service was continually under attack and investigation by committees in both House and Senate, and by the State Department's Loyalty Board. Press coverage, often derogatory in the extreme, was a constant drumbeat. Though no new criminal charges were levelled, and all the investigations ended inconclusively or with exoneration, Service was made so radioactive that Dean Acheson finally acquiesced in 1952 to the demand that he be terminated as a Foreign Service officer.
For the next five years, Service fought through the courts to clear his name and to secure reinstatement as a Foreign Service officer. Finally, in June 1957, the Supreme Court found unanimously in his favour, and directed the State Department to return him to duty with back pay for his years in the wilderness. But still controversial, he was assigned to a trivial dead-end post in Liverpool. Joiner's recounting of these interminable investigations, hearings, and court actions replicates in miniature for the reader their endlessly suffocating quality.
In 1963, Jack Service finally left the State Department; he and Caroline settled in Berkeley, where he had a mostly tranquil and personally rewarding post-career career at the University's Center for Chinese Studies. Even so, the charges did not go away, as in Senator James Eastland's 1970 publication of two volumes of Amerasia case documents, featuring Jack Service as a key agent of Mao's victory.
Late in his life, in hindsight, while affirming his loyalty and defending his motives, Service acknowledged that he had been sometimes too trusting, that he had believed some things and done some things he later regretted. He died in 1999, six months short of his ninetieth birthday.
Ironically, Joiner may have stirred the creature to move once again. In two puzzlingly different reviews by Jonathan Mirsky, appearing a week apart in different editions of The Wall Street Journal (14 and 20 December 2009), Mirsky says that her book resurfaced his recollection of two phone conversations, forgotten for more than a decade, in which Service confessed that he had passed top-secret material to Philip Jaffe. On this basis, Mirsky implies that Service may, indeed, have been guilty of treason.
Joiner's book is part biography, part history of an extraordinarily complex and tormented chapter in China–US relations, and part description and analysis of the paranoid style in American politics during the McCarthy era. There are lessons to be learned here, for yesterday and for today.
