This book is the latest offering about the controversy and personal saga involving the wartime arrest of John S. Service, a U.S. State Department official, for knowingly leaking government documents. An unapologetic friend and admirer of her subject, Joiner, a former news anchorwoman, journalist, and amateur historian, has done exhaustive research using old and new sources and produced a lengthy defense of Service, a key figure in the sensational Amerasia spy case of 1945, in which hundreds of internal U.S. government documents were furtively provided to the Communist-leaning opinion journal Amerasia. The Amerasia case and Service would become a major point of contention during the 1950s’ fierce national debate on “who lost China.” Service's culpability in this case was prominently used by anticommunist politicians such as Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Interestingly, the author readily admits Service's culpability in leaking the documents. Commenting on Service's dropping off of eight or ten more documents to his handler, Phillip Jaffe, in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 1945, Joiner writes, “it is indeed puzzling that John Service . . . could be so recklessly indiscreet in Washington” (p. 147). Yet the book is about far more than Service's reckless actions. First and foremost, it is about zeal—Service's zeal to get his views on the Chinese Nationalist government and the Chinese Communist movement accepted by the American government; various congressional committees’ zeal to publicly investigate and condemn Service's behavior; and the author's zeal to prove Service's innocence as a victim of the anticommunist zeitgeist of the Cold War era. As the author aptly offers, Service “may have indeed become too zealous in promoting his policy views” (p. 147). In fact, such was the zealotry of Service's efforts to reverse America's official China policy that it almost certainly damaged his credibility as an objective observer of the Chinese Communist movement. As Service readily admitted to the author, “I had become very much involved in what was going on there, and in the policy options for America, so that it had probably compromised my impartiality” (p. 147). Service's overly eager and partial lobbying effort for Mao's Communists in Yenan certainly did him no good when he was brought into the White House for a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's aide, Harry Hopkins (pp. 98–99).

This book is also about something bigger than the Amerasia case and Service. Subtitled Mao's China, McCarthy's America, and the Persecution of John S. Service, it essentially is about America's favorite national pastime: internecine partisan party politics, which frequently affects political reporting and policy discourse. A junior State Department employee temporarily loaned as a political intelligence officer to the U.S. Army's headquarters under Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, Service was given the job of providing positive spin for Mao's Communist force in Yenan during Stilwell's epic struggle to obtain command over the entire Chinese armed forces. To Stilwell, occupied with the Burma campaign in the south, an expedient alliance with the Communist forces in the north would have had very little military utility. However, such an alliance would have had great political leverage, for it would have greatly annoyed and worried the Nationalist government and Chiang Kai-shek, who might have been forced to give Stilwell command over the Chinese armed forces. As such, the nature of Service's political reports was a policy ploy designed to influence Washington, and thus almost guaranteed to be slanted.

When those slanted reports on Mao's regime conflicted with Cold War reality in the 1950s, they became the target of partisan attack, most notoriously from Senator McCarthy. Service became a villain. Yet when President Richard M. Nixon went to China in 1972, Service became a hero. And Mao's China became a continuation of Service's benign Yenan, despite the Cultural Revolution ravaging China at the time.

In the end, this book provides another instance of the endless fight over who's got it right on China, whatever the Chinese reality. That is to say, in the peculiar debate on Communist China, the questions asked and issues debated often reflect American partisan politics and policy spins rather than Chinese reality. In fact, the symbiosis of Mao's Yenan and the bloody reign of the “Proletarian Dictatorship” after 1949 has been well established by several recent authoritative works, written by historians both inside and outside China. Yet the ultimate concern of this book's author is not whether Service was right or wrong about Yenan, but McCarthyism and the darker side of American political reality.

The book is thoroughly researched and painstakingly written, though with a noticeable absence of any meaningful Chinese-language material and scholarship on Mao's Yenan and other China-related subjects by Chinese scholars in recent decades. The interpretative frame is partisan and personal, but conforms to this genre of popular history.