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John S. Service Oral History Interview, Chap XII-XIV

Oral History Interview with
John S. Service

Political adviser to the Commander in Chief of American forces in the China-Burma-India Theater, 1943-45; executive officer to the political adviser to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Far East, 1945-46; First Secretary of the American Legation, Wellington, New Zealand, 1946-48.

Berkeley, California
Oct. 24 | Nov. 4 | Nov. 7 | Nov. 14, 1977
by the University of California Bancroft Library/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office (Rosemary Levenson interviewer)

Chapters XII, XIII, and XIV

[Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional John S. Service Chapters]


Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview donated to the Harry S. Truman Library. The reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word, although some editing was done.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and John S. Service, dated March 7, 1980.

No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with John S. Service requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to grant or deny permission.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

John S. Service, "State Department Duty in China, The McCarthy Era, and After, 1933-1977," an oral history conducted 1977-1978 by Rosemary Levenson, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1981.

Opened March, 1980
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | Additional John S. Service Chapters]



Oral History Interview with
John S. Service

Berkeley, California
October 24, 1977
by the University of California Bancroft Library/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office (Rosemary Levenson interviewer)

Chapters XII through XIV

[397]

CHAPTER XII

XII FROM FIRING TO REINSTATEMENT
[Interview 11:October 24, 1977]

Some Addenda:Transcripts, Personal Relations, Effects on the Family, Finances

LEVENSON:Was it normal practice for transcripts of loyalty hearings to be given to the subject of the review?

J. SERVICE:It was at that time, but they changed all this almost immediately.There was a great furor because the State Department published the rationale of the Loyalty Review Board in their decision.

When the Republicans came in, and maybe before that, I think they tightened up everything and stopped giving you transcripts.I'd had the transcript of my hearings before the Loyalty Security Board in the State Department.I also got transcripts of the Loyalty Review Board.

When I had new hearings later on, in 1958, after I came back to the Department, there was no transcript.I think it was to prevent such things as giving them any publicity that they stopped doing it, although, it was a hindrance to the man who was being accused, making it more difficult for him.

LEVENSON:What other circulation if any did it have, to your knowledge?

J. SERVICE:It didn't have any that I know of, but as I mentioned last time, an employee of the Loyalty Review Board was leaking stuff to McCarthy, so that we don't know what further circulation it may have had through means like that.

LEVENSON:Were you personally ostracized at this time?

J. SERVICE: After the firing there were a certain number of people in the State Department, because of their positions, who felt that they had to discontinue contact.But, they were very few.

[398]

J. SERVICE:I wasn't pursuing anybody anyway.I had made it a point in New York, for instance, not to look people up.I thought that if they wanted to see me they would look me up.

Then there were some people that I didn't want to see.Jaffe and people that had been associated with Amerasia, some of them made tentative gestures and I indicated, I thought pretty clearly, that I didn't want to maintain any of that relationship.

People like Brooks Atkinson said to me afterward, "Why didn't you look me up?" [chuckling] Well, I thought that it was really up to them to take the initiative, you know.

LEVENSON:Then, you found for me this Saturday Evening Post article by Drew Pearson, "Confessions of an S.O.B.," 1956.How much validity do you think there was in his comment?

"Despite all my precautions I feel that I was responsible for a serious injustice being done to two government servants.One was John Service, a State Department Foreign Service officer, who was fired on the charge of being a poor security risk because he had talked to newspapermen and others. One of those newspaper men, I suspect, was I, for on at least one occasion I went to Service's apartment and talked with him about Patrick J. Hurley with whom he had served. . . Later, I learned that microphones had been planted in Service's apartment."

J. SERVICE:I talked to Pearson a good many times.As I recall that particular incident, at least what I think was that incident, he called me and came around and picked me up.Then we went riding in his car, which I assumed was caution on his part.But, it's true that if our phones were tapped, why, it was known that he called me.

But, he was simply asking about the story that Hurley and [General Robert B.] McClure had almost come to blows at some sort of a gathering in Chungking.He wanted to find out if a story which, he'd already heard had any basis in it or not.

LEVENSON:Had it?

J. SERVICE:Yes.

LEVENSON: How did you maintain your spirits through this long ordeal?I don't know how you date it, whether you call it a twelve year ordeal, from '45 to '57, or shorter than that.But the strain
of it must have been overwhelming at times .

[399]

J. SERVICE:Well, I don't think it was a strain for most of that period. The tough period was these eighteen months or so, from March, 1950, till after I was established in New York. You might call
it two years, I suppose.

After we were established in New York I had a job.Then the matter just had to rock along through the courts.We were sort of used to living with it, and it wasn't very much on our minds.

I don't know.I think probably the fact that I was steadily engaged, busy, most of the time--There were long periods when there wasn't anything to do, but as I said I managed to try to keep myself occupied one way or another.

It was much more difficult in many ways for Caroline than it was for me.We were separated, in '45 [Japan] and again in 1950. She went on to India and I went to Washington, so that she was isolated and I wasn't very good then or ever at writing letters.So that certainly was difficult for her.

But even when she came back to Washington she very sensibly, I think, kept out of the day to day legal work that we were doing.I think she just decided to leave the details to us, which was a good thing because she and Ed [Rhetts] rubbed on each other a little bit.

Ed's methods of work are more like mine, dilatory but then working very hard to a deadline, doing very little work in the morning but getting progressively more efficient or effective--or at least you think you are--as the day goes on, so that we did a lot of work at night and times like that.

Caroline likes definite and specific answers.She wants to know when is something going to happen, how long it s going to take, what is going to be the likely result, which of course was the sort of answer no one could give.We had no way of knowing when Humelsine was going to act, or what was going to be the next move.So, as I say, it was probably tougher on her than on me.

It was hard to know how much the children were affected.I don't know whether Caroline mentioned or, not, but the day after the firing we told them they didn't have to go to school if they wanted to stay home.But they went to school and apparently had no problems.At least they said no problems.

Ginny finished second in her class and got an award.We were in northwest Washington, with a lot of other government people.I think many of them were sympathetic.A lot of them were fairly sophisticated by this time on this sort of thing.

[400]

J. SERVICE: After we got to New York, as I say, things were much less tense.We actually lived a fairly normal life.

LEVENSON:What about your mother?

J. SERVICE:She lost some friendships.Some China people, particularly missionaries, tended to stick to the Kuomintang and consider me to be of the devil.With those friends, Mother just broke offrelations.But she had a good many staunch people that stuck by her.

I went out to see her in October 1950, just after the hearings were all over.My brother, Dick, was in Moscow, and his wife was living in Washington.He got a vacation from Moscow and came out to Germany, I think, and Helen went over and spent some time in Germany, a couple of weeks or something.

Helen let me use her car, and I drove across the continent, saw my mother, and we had a very fine visit for a few days in Claremont.

Then I got word that Helen unexpectedly had returned to Washington which meant that she wanted her car.So I drove from Claremont, California to Washington D.C. in three days.

LEVENSON:Before freeways.

J. SERVICE:[laughter]Here's a card, for instance, to Caroline's parents.This was early '51.* They were worried.I think that they were far more worried than my mother because my mother just assumed, as I did, that everything was going to come out all right.

Caroline's father was a somewhat nervous man.I'm just telling him there, and this is indicative I think of my attitude, "Don't worry, don't worry.We're going to come out all right," which was what I, at least, firmly believed.

Even when I was fired I don't think that I thought of it as a shock.I hadn't expected it.I don't think that I was as concerned about a job as perhaps Caroline was, simply because I've got enough arrogance or conceit to be sure that I could get a job.

I'd done all kinds of work really in the Foreign Service, and it just seemed to me unthinkable that I wouldn't find something to do.It didn't turn out to be that easy, but at least I wasn't panic-stricken or paralyzed with the idea that we would starve or not be able to find something to do. (See Page 400a)

[400a]

Dear Mother and Father:

Feb. 9, 1951

Nothing to worry about! Caroline and children are all well and I am hearing regularly.Last letter was Feb. 1 which I received yesterday... am mailing it to you.I suppose she must be busy if she has not been able to write.No news here.Can't tell yet what will be the effect of the Remington conviction but it will certainly be used by the GOPs to discredit the Loyalty Boards, the loyalty program and the whole administration.There is nothing we can do but wait . . . calmly and
patiently.... there is nothing to fear. Don't worry and fret.

Much love to all
Jack

[401]

LEVENSON:You mentioned your brother, Dick, in the Foreign Service.Was his career affected by your troubles, and if not, how did he escape in the climate of those times?

J. SERVICE:I think as far as the State Department was concerned--after all, the State Department was never really out to get me, though a few at the top like Humelsine wanted to shield Acheson. But the working State Department understood my situation and had approved my views.

You can't measure it, and it may not be appreciable at all, but Dick certainly didn't suffer and it may even have helped him a little bit in sort of a reverse way.I mean that people wanted to demonstrate that they had no prejudice, the same way my son, Bob, has done well.I think the State Department tried to lean backward to show that there was no prejudice.

Dick had the advantage of not being under Hurley in Chungking, not having to confront Hurley or be in a row with Hurley.He did not sign the telegram of February 28 because he was off in Kweilin where he was under another man, Ringwalt.He didn't have as much chance for independent reporting as I did, and generally he just was able to keep out of the line of fire.

Now, I'm not sure that if Dick had been doing a lot of independent reporting whether he would have been as outspoken in his expression of views as I was.He just isn't quite the same kind of person.He's more of a diplomat.

Dick actually went up to class I very rapidly.That's why he was forced to retire, because they got so many people in class I they finally had to put in this rule setting a time limit of twelve years in class I.

He was a very good administrative officer, a good person dealing with people, excellent.I don't think that his strong point particularly was political reporting, although he did some.

[pause] We were saying something about the tenor of the times.Here's a letter from me to my mother in late, November 23, 1952.I'm describing John Davies's going through Washington.He'd just been having some preliminary hearings.He also went through this whole process several times.

I had started to take him to the airport.Then, because of bad weather the airplane did not take off. We lived not too far from Kennedy, which was then called Idlewild Airport.John started to come back home with me but then decided he'd better not, as

[401a]

OCTOBER, 1951

THEY FOUGHT COMMUNISM AND WERE SMEARED

(Photos)
Jack Moffitt
Fred Niblo, Jr.
Hedda Hopper
Adolph Menjou
J. McGuinness

(Photo caption)
Patriotic Americans who were leaders in the fight against Communism in Hollywood. They paid a price for their loyalty, only to find that now it is "popular" to oppose Communism, and every fellow traveler in the movie capitol may be heard spouting his "love" for America the while he produces, writes, plays in films that seek to destroy America.

These "PETS"
of the State
Department
played ball
with the Reds
and were
promoted.

John S. Service
John Davies
John Carter Vincent

SALUTE TO ADOLPHE MENJOU

When a fellow needs a friend and he comes out of the blue like Menjou did for the American Way of Life, one never forgets.I have watched his triumphs with unbounded joy.He became the greatest stealer of pictures in the business.His editor, in Front Page, is one of the greatest performance in history.He was considered not only the finest groomed personality in the film capital, but the world, and he was elevated to stardom.When the time came, however, for Menjou to choose between protecting his country in witnessing against communism or in favoring the industry, crawling with reds, he uplifted the flag and downed the subversive element, which cost him a small fortune and stardom.Like MacArthur, there was no price on Menjou's patriotism and, again like MacArthur, he proved you can't go wrong doing right--just as Truman and his gang have shown they can't go right doing wrong.Adolphe Menjou today is one of the most respected actors in pictures, looked up to for counsel and displaying many qualities of a statesman.Fulton Lewis, Jr., who has accomplished so much for his country, recognized Adolphe Menjou's superiority and invited him to take over his column for one day in the Examiner.Reading this, I found that, added to his other talents, Menjou is a masterful writer.Here, in a few, terse, well selected words, he paints a vivid picture of the international scene and suggests a remedy. "Why," Menjou asks, "did we demobilize the greatest armed force in world's history until some degree of stability had been accomplished?"Following is an all-important panacea that should be in every newspaper, broadcast by radio, television, and from every pulpit."I believe," says Menjou, "THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN AMERICA SHOULD BE OUTLAWED BY CONGRESS.Some say it would drive them underground. WHERE ARE THEY NOW?I only know a handful who will admit membership.If we drive them deep enough, they will have trouble breathing." Jerome Storm, Desert Hot Springs Sentinel.

National Wage Earner, Volume II, #9

[402]

J. SERVICE:he was undoubtedly being watched and trailed.So he decided not to stay with me, an old friend from childhood days, because we were presumably being watched and trailed. It's just an example of the spirit of the times.

The Government Denies that Jack was Fired for Reasons of Loyalty or Security:the Loyalty Review Board's "Forced" Unanimity

J. SERVICE: Now, we don't have very much press coverage, but at one time in the course of legal arguments, the government tried to argue that I had not been fired for loyalty or for security.This is an outrageous argument that only lawyers could dream up.But, we'll come to it in due course. The lawyers wanted me to dig up the clippings.I made this collage simply to show that there was no doubt in the minds of the people that I was fired for loyalty.*

LEVENSON:This is a fantastic thing.

J. SERVICE:One thing about the standards at this time was that although the Loyalty Review Board insisted on my being fired, they said in their last paragraph, "We are not required to find Service guilty of disloyalty, and we do not do so."They also said they did not find that I was a Communist, but nonetheless they were determined that I was going to go.

I'm not sure whether I mentioned before or not, but Eric Sevareid on December 14 gave a very nice broadcast.He used his broadcast period for something about me, which I don't know whether you want to see or not.

LEVENSON: Yes, please.

J. SERVICE: Eric told me later on that he'd had considerable trouble over the broadcast. Apparently some CBS stations were unhappy, and some people in CBS were unhappy about it.But he went ahead and did it.

Before I go on, let me say one thing about the Loyalty Review Board.The vote on the panel, we were told, informally--Reilly found out through his friends--was two to one.Apparently very strong pressure was put on the third member to change his vote to make it unanimous. (See page 402a)

[402a]

The Detroit Free Press
Friday, December 14, 1951

Acheson Fires Aide for Doubtful Loyalty

[403]

J. SERVICE:This fact was used by people like David Lawrence.There was a lot of criticism of the decision in some of the papers, The Washington Post and so on.Lawrence was able to say that the vote had been unanimous.Krock of the New York Times came out and talked about the high quality and outstanding character of the people of the panel and so on.

LEVENSON:What sort of pressure would that have been?How would a retired respectable Republican lawyer be vulnerable to it?

J. SERVICE:Perhaps the argument went like this.We're going to be under criticism, we should make a united front.I'm not sure just how they persuaded him to change his mind.I wasn't there obviously.Apparently he was willing to make it unanimous.

Allegations Equal Evidence:Evidence Equals Fact

J. SERVICE:Before we go any further, I think we ought to bring in this transcript of a hearing by the State, Justice, Commerce, and Judiciary Subcommittee--in other words the subcommittee that deals with State Department appropriations--of the Senate Appropriations Committee (With the Service papers on deposit in The Bancroft Library), This was a meeting they held March 25, 1952, just three months after my firing, in which they've got Humelsine along with the director of consular and security affairs, the head of the division of security, chairman of the Loyalty Security Board (poor old Conrad Snow whose name they have wrong) , and so on.The whole thing is just badgering Humelsine on my case, how could Humelsine have cleared me, which Humelsine had admitted that he did several times, in the knowledge that I had been living in Chungking with a woman who was a Communist, who was in Russian pay.

Humelsine keeps coming back to the fact, or trying to come back to the fact, that these are allegations, but they're not evidence.Yet these are lawyers on the panel.They're all lawyers-- McCarran.Then there's Lister Hill, Bridges, Saltonstall, Ferguson, McCarthy.Ferguson had been a judge.McCarthy had been a judge.Humelsine makes a poor case.He doesn't point out where the evidence came from.He just points out that it couldn't be backed up.

[404]

J. SERVICE:They tried to ask Snow some questions, and Humelsine refused to let poor old Snow say anything.Nicholson said, "There's no indication that she was a Communist."But, then they just keep coming back to the "fact."Allegations equals evidence, evidence equals fact.The whole thing is a very weird performance.

The interesting thing about this is that it was removed from the transcript on the instructions of the subcommittee.We've got it here."The subcommittee on Wednesday, March 26"--in other words the next day--"on the motion of Senator Saltonstall," who defends Caroline--

LEVENSON:Defends --?

J. SERVICE: Caroline, that after all she was a virtuous woman. You can read it.

"[The subcommittee], after the matter was raised by Chairman McCarran, agreed that the Department of State could remove from the original transcript the references to Mr. Service, and the carbon copies of the transcript would be filed in the safe in the office of Senator McCarran, subcommittee chairman."

Nonetheless, this transcript turns up in the personal papers of Senator [Styles] Bridges.It was found just this year, [1977] by an academic researcher named [Robert] Newman, from the University of Pittsburgh, I think, in Bridges papers, although it had supposedly been removed by committee vote.

Bridges received very heavy contributions in his election campaign from the Chinese.This was alleged at the time, and he never denied it.He was one of the leaders of the China Lobby. The fact that these particular senators were deciding the State Department appropriations is evidence of the kind of pressure the State Department was under.McCarthy, Ferguson, McCarran, Bridges

LEVENSON:Did any of this leak out at the time?

J. SERVICE:The discussions in the Loyalty Review Board had leaked.McCarthy brings those stories back into the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee.The whole thing is verification of the fact that McCarthy had an informer within the Loyalty Review Board.

[404a]

177 East 78 St.
New York 21, N.T.
March 3, 1951

Mr. John Service
1327 30th Street, NW
Washington 14, D.C.

Dear Jack:

Of course I'll tell you all I know about Valentine Chao's baby.

I saw Val first in New York in August, 1946.She was living with Mrs. Percy Chen, who asked me to come to her apartment to help someone from Chungking.It was Val, who was going to have her baby soon, and was desperate.I'd seen her often at parties in China, but her English and my Chinese were so poor that we'd never actually talked.She had a scholarship in the Yale drama school and a job teaching Chinese at Yale that fall; but she couldn't keep an illegitimate child
with her in a dormitory, and she'd found no one to care for it.She asked if I knew how to find a good but inexpensive foster home.I had a large house in Larchmont, New York, with a servants' wing in which our Nisei gardener had accumulated about six members of his family. After many discouraging visits to agencies and dirty crowded foster homes, I asked the gardener's wife--who seemed like the perfect person--if she would take care of the baby.She agreed that she would, for a small sum each month which Val paid herself.

The baby was born on September 19, 1946, at the Park-East Hospital in New York, and named Hsieh Yun-hui.(By the way, might the hospital have a record of the baby's and mother's blood types?)Val listed the father on the birth certificate (which I still have) as John Hsieh, white, an engineer, born in California.She debated for a long time about the baby's surname.She thought of using Chao, but wanted to avoid the label of illegitimacy.She had almost decided to call the father John Smith, because she knew that the child would not look completely Chinese--and it did have blonde hair and blue eyes.A letter from her mother made her decide on Hsieh, her mother's maiden name.Her mother wrote that she understood and forgave Val, and would be glad to raise the baby on the Hsieh family land.

Val stayed with me for a few weeks after the baby was born, and visited occasionally over weekends for most of the next two years.I had taken it for granted that the baby was yours, since it seemed understandable that a romantic dramatic person like Val would want the child of a man she loved and couldn't have.I probably embarrassed her constantly by this romantic assumption, and it took her six months to confess that the father was a major she'd met in Shanghai late in 1945
or early in 1946.She showed me his picture and a letter he'd written her, and told me his name; I'd never known him, and I don't remember it.I'm convinced that she was telling the truth, because it was a painful admission for her to make.She was afraid that I'd be so disillusioned, after my ideas of a great lifelong romance, that I'd insist she take the baby away.She said that she had not seen you for over a year before the baby was born and knew that she would never see you again.

I m not sure who might remember the baby's father.General George Olmsted of Des Moines, Iowa, knew about the baby; he assumed, as I did, that you were the father; but he saw Val occasionally here,

[404b]

- 2 -

and had been in Shanghai when she was--she may have told him finally.George Kennedy of Yale wanted to adopt the child; he may know.Lao Shaw, author of "Rickshaw Boy", saw Val often here; she may have told him.

I think, by the way, that Communist convictions had nothing to do with Val's return to China.I heard her criticize the Chiang government loudly, but I also heard her dread and fear a communist one. She hoped to find acting jobs here in New York to support herself, but couldn't; and she was having trouble getting her passport renewed. She even thought for awhile going to Canada to re-enter the country so that she could get permission to work. I think she finally got permission to
stay for a short time as a student, but not as a worker, and she left most unwillingly simply because she no longer had money to live here. She went back by way of England, hoping that she'd find an acting job and be allowed to stay there. The last time I heard from her was a letter from France, saying that she'd given up completely and had no choice but to go back to China; and she added hopefully that perhaps there might be less censorship than under the old government so that she might act after all. She promised to write often to let me know how she and the baby were getting along. That was 1949, and I've heard nothing since.

[Notary Public Stamp Here]

Sincerely,

Annalee Jacoby Fadiman

[405]

Commitment to Lawyer to Fight Case to the End

J. SERVICE:I mentioned earlier that I had decided to challenge my dismissal in the courts.My lawyer, Ed Rhetts, wanted to be sure we'd stick with it.Also, he was quite insistent that he stay in control.

We talked to the A[merican] C[ivil] L[iberties] U[nion], which was not very brave in those days. The ACLU was not leading any fights against McCarthy on behalf of McCarthy's victims. They were willing to help, but only on the condition that we put ourselves in their hands.

Then there was another rather left-wing group, Emergency Conference for Civil Liberties.We would have had to put ourselves entirely in their hands, too, and we didn't want that.

Anyway, I assured Ed that if we went in I would stay with it to the end.He realized that there would be very little in it financially for him.We had tried up to this point to cover overhead, but we hadn't really done that.We'd been able to scrape together a couple of thousand dollars here and there.

Friends in the State Department started a fund, but that only raised, I think, a total of about $7,000. Some of that was done by friends like Joe Rauh persuading people to give a thousand dollars. Purposely, I never knew who gave money to that fund.I didn't want to know who had given since that would involve my knowing who had not given.I preferred not to know, but also as I said the other day we had promised people that their contributions would be anonymous.

A lot of people helped Ed in preparing the case.He had a very good friend named [John L.] Burling whose father was one of the senior partners in Acheson's law firm.Covington, Burling, et cetera was the name of the firm.It was one of the biggest--famous Washington firms.

Jack Burling, Ed's friend and contemporary, found that, I think, he didn't fit very well in his father's firm.He was really out of work, and devoted a lot of time to my case.Various other people in Washington and New York were interested in the case and they all helped.

We--I always speak of Ed Rhetts and myself as "we," but maybe I should say Rhetts and the lawyers--realized that we probably could only win on a very technical, legal point, but we tried to get everything into the hearings, into the court proceedings that we could.

[405a]

The Washington Post
Sunday, January 6, 1952

McCarthy Reveals Review Board 'Transcript' Hitting State Department

Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) yesterday released a partial transcript of a meeting of the Federal Loyalty Review Board in which one member complained that the State Department's loyalty program was "completely ineffective."

Board chairman Hiram Bingham was also disclosed to have told Secretary of State Dean Acheson personally that the Department's loyalty panel was “out of step with the rest of the program."

McCarthy refused to say how he obtained the transcript.But he vouched for its authenticity as a faithful recording of a closed board meeting last February.

The meeting was held before President Truman changed the loyalty regulations to permit the dismissal of a government employee if there is "reasonable doubt" of his loyalty.

Under the previous regulations, a man could be fired only if the board had affirmative evidence that he was disloyal at that time.

According to the transcript, the pending change in the regulations was one of the topics under discussion at the meeting.

At one point, according to the reported transcript, Lawrence W. Meloy, the board's executive secretary, mentioned that the State Department's loyalty panel members took the attitude that "they're there to clear the employee and not to protect the government."

"We've been arguing with them since the program started," Meloy said.

Board member Garrett Hoag was quoted as saying he was “disturbed about the State Department-- their remarkable record of never having fired anybody for disloyalty."

He suggested that perhaps the board ought to call President Truman s attention "to the fact that the program simply does not work in that department, and let him worry about it," according to the transcript

"It seems to me," he was quoted as saying, "We assume some responsibility when we sit back here for three years and know that the country rests in a false sense of security."

Hoag added that the public believes "we are looking after their interests here when we know darn well that it (the loyalty program) is completely ineffective in one of the most important departments of the Government."

Under the terms of Mr. Truman's loyalty program executive order, he said, the Review Board, should not merely serve as an appellate court but should supervise the whole loyalty program.

"It is quite intended," he said, "that we shall keep a weather eye on the whole program and

Bingham then revealed, according to the reported transcript, that he had taken up the State Department's loyalty program with Acheson personally the previous Friday.

"I called his attention to the fact that his board was out of step with all other agency boards," he said.

"In the Post Office Department," Bingham was reported as stating, "10 percent of all persons examined were found to be worthy of separation from the Government.In the Commerce Department, 6 1/2 percent.The average was about 6 percent.The State Department, zero."

Bingham said Acheson was "very much impressed by what I said, and promised to look into
the matter immediately."

He said Acheson "obviously" took immediate action because the following Monday a Department security officer telephoned to ask if anyone in the State Department opposed the pending change in the loyalty regulations.”

[406]

J. SERVICE:The fact that we had never been able to get, for instance, the transcripts of conversations with Jaffe.The FBI finally admitted that they had been destroyed, that all they had were digests, excerpts, summaries.

We tried to get the Loyalty Review Board minutes where they had talked about percentages and talked about affairs that really were not their concern and on which I had not been questioned. We tried to get as much of this type of material as possible into the judicial process.This is one of the principal reasons why we had so much trouble in getting into the court.

Our first complaint, you see, was a big fat book.[showing original complaint]This took us a long time to prepare.

LEVENSON:One hundred and forty-six pages.

J. SERVICE:Yes, and it has a lot of exhibits.I don't think I have all the various complaints.I've given some materials on the McCarthy period to the Truman Library.

I must say that the attitude of the Department of Justice was as different as possible from the Department of State.We'd always had an ambivalent relationship with the people at the top of the State Department.The administrators really regarding me as a hot potato."Can't you go work for the CIA?" or "Can't you think of retiring?" or this or that."We've got to save Acheson." Whereas below the top, everyone was basically cooperative and friendly.

The Department of Justice all the way through was as ugly and as unpleasant as could be.It was strictly a very tough, hardball, no-concessions legal confrontation.They charged us with bringing in excessive, irrelevant matters and had the complaint rejected.

If the complaint is rejected then you have a right to submit an amended complaint.This process went on and on.Finally, in 1955, our third amended complaint was accepted in court.In other words that was a fourth complaint.There was the original complaint, and then we submitted three amended complaints.

Each of these was a long process of rewriting, boiling down, meeting whatever objections the judge raised.

Ed Rhetts had moved away from Washington.His practice there had run into problems.We don't need to go into that.

LEVENSON:Were they in any way connected with his defense of you?

[407]

J. SERVICE: I don't think so, although obviously he hadn't been contributing much to the firm. But, I don't think that was why the firm broke up.He and Gerry Reilly, I think, had some differences of opinion generally.

Ed had always had an interest in politics, and he wanted to establish residence back in Indiana, which was his home, southern Indiana, and run for Congress.He almost made it.I think if the primaries had been honest, he probably would have.

But, he was running against a sheriff.He had several counties, and the sheriff in one of the counties piled up an enormous majority which wiped out Ed's majority in all the other counties in the district.So, there was a little suspicion, shall we say, about the way the votes were counted!

Anyway, this all required my traveling to Indiana or to New York for consultation, letter writing and so on.The third amended complaint was finally put through.

Job Hunting

J. SERVICE:I got a lot of letters of sympathy and offers of help on job hunting from all sorts of people.Some people sent checks.I could have gone to New Zealand, but we didn't want to go.I don't think any of us wanted to leave the U.S.That was the point.

Sevareid's broadcast brought in an offer by somebody who had a small boat supply business.He was a dentist, and he ran this as a sideline.He decided that he didn't really want it, so he asked Sevareid to offer it to me.But it didn't seem a very likely thing.

The husband of one of Caroline's aunts who had a secondhand book business in Providence, Rhode Island, which was not making any money, offered that to me.

Various friends knew people.Avra Warren, who had been the American ambassador in New Zealand, my old boss, was a friend of Nelson Rockefeller's.Various other people I had known knew fairly high people in General Motors, some corporations, foundations, and so on.

So I did a lot of running back and forth from Washington to New York talking to people, but it always boiled down to the consideration that I was a controversial character.

[408]

LEVENSON:How were you received in general?

J. SERVICE:Generally a friendly reception.I think most of the personnel people I talked to were really embarrassed.But they just didn't dare touch me.The corporation people would generally say, "Well, we have stockholders, and there will be stockholder complaints," and so on.Foundation people were worried because foundations were under attack.

I talked to people at UNICEF.They were under attack for hiring people that were politically left. Trygve Lie caved in on that question and gave the U.S. veto power over any people they hired, which meant, in those days, people like McCarran, and members of the Internal Security Subcommittee, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and so on.They were really given a veto power over any Americans hired by the UN.All these things turned out to be dead end.I was running up against this controversial character business.

A Surprise Offer From Clement Wells of Sarco. "We'll Tell You the Difference Between a Steam Trap and a Mouse Trap."

J. SERVICE:One day I got a letter from a man I'd never heard of, Clement Wells.I can't find the letter unfortunately.It's one of the treasures I've put away so carefully that now I can't find it! But, I can almost remember it.He said, just very short and businesslike, "I've read about your case. I think you've been badly treated by your government.I don't know what your plans are, but in case you are looking for employment, I think I might have something that would interest you.If you wish, please call on me or write," or something of this sort.

He was a manufacturer of steam traps and steam specialties.I first had to find out what they were. I went down to the Washington Public Library and dug around, found out what a steam trap was.

One of my introductions was to a business man, who wanted to help but couldn't give me a job himself.He was willing to get a Dun and Bradstreet report on Sarco.It turned out that it was a small, privately held company with very good credit ratings.It seemed to be a substantial outfit.

Another friend, Bob Barnett, an old China friend in the State Department, was very concerned that I protect myself--. He thought this offer was so strange that we ought to investigate

[409]

J. SERVICE:it.So he approached General Snow, the head of the Loyalty Security Board. [laughter] Snow made some inquiries, and it turned out that the security people had nothing against the company.Apparently it was not a front for some leftist or Communist outfit.

I went up to New York and saw Mr. Clement Wells, a small, old-fashioned man in a corner office in the Empire State Building sitting behind a rolltop desk.He was very pleasant, an Englishman. He said, "I suppose you don't know the difference between a steam trap and a mouse trap, but never mind:we'll tell you.We'll show you."Very cheerful.I tried to tell him I didn't know any foreign languages except Chinese.I don't think he ever heard that, because he was always surprised to find I couldn't speak French or German.

I decided to think about it for a while.Then, I wrote back that I would go to the factory.He suggested first that I go to the factory at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for a week.I went there,
I think, sometime in March [1952].

I worked for a week at the factory, and by then I felt that I really would like to stay another week. So I had two weeks working on the assembly line in the factory, doing odd jobs.They moved me around a bit, but I was regarded as sort of a curiosity.

Before Wells took me on, he had me meet the other executives, the other top men in the New York office, and of course they didn't know what to make of this. Their questions tended to concentrate on how much engineering background and practical plumbing and engineering type information I had.They had no basis for refusing me or arguing against me at that time.Later on they did.

LEVENSON:Would you explain what a steam trap is, what it does, and why it's important?

J. SERVICE: A steam trap is an automatic valve that closes to steam and opens to water.Generally speaking, wherever you use steam as a heat medium after the steam gives up its latent heat, it's condensed from steam to water, then you want to return the water to the boiler because it's still got some heat in it. You don't want to waste that water.You return that water to the boiler to be made into steam again.So you have a closed system.But, you've got to have some sort of an automatic valve in there that lets the water go back but holds the steam in the equipment.

[410]

J. SERVICE:The simplest example is a laundry press or a dry cleaning establishment.Under every pressing board there's a steam trap.So that millions of them are in use.A big refinery like the Standard Oil refinery in Linden, New Jersey, for instance, will probably have six thousand steam traps in it, because you've got to run steam all along the oil lines, all through the refinery so the oil doesn't freeze up and congeal.But that water you want to get back, keep the steam in

They work on all sorts of different principles.Eventually I got into a rather exotic type of steam trap, but we'll go into that later.

You asked the other day about the meaning of Sarco.I found that I do have some Sarco history files.Apparently the company that Wells was working for when he first came to the United States was called Sanders, Rehders and Company of London, England.Sanders and Rehders Company is where the Sarco name came from.It is an acronym.

After two weeks at the factory I came to New York and started work.I lived with some old Oberlin friends out in Scarsdale for a while.

Dean Rusk, by this time, was out of the State Department.He was the head of the Rockefeller Foundation.He lived in Scarsdale also.We often used to see each other on the train going down to work.We were never good friends, but there were cordial greetings, occasionally a short conversation.

After I'd been in Scarsdale for a while I moved in with some New Zealand friends who were running the New Zealand consulate and working at the UN delegation.They could use me as baby sitter.

Caroline and the family stayed in Washington so the children could finish the school year.

LEVENSON:What were your responsibilities when you first went into Sarco, and how did they develop?

J. SERVICE: The responsibilities were to assist in and help develop the export business.That was my primary responsibility.Very soon after I came in, Wells started a new company called Sarco International.He was rather prone to have small, separate companies.He was the owner of all of them.To satisfy legal requirements, his wife or one of his employees would hold one or two shares, but actually he was the sole owner.He set up--this was advantageous for tax reasons--he set up a separate little company called Sarco International to handle foreign business.

[410a]

HISTORY OF SARCO.

In 1911 the Sarco Fuel Saving and Engineering Co. (the predecessor of Sarco Company, Inc.) imported some engineering appliances from Germany, principally CO2 Recorders, Gauges and Steam Flow Meters, and these specialties also included a few steam traps made by Herrman Sandvoss of Duesseldorf .

Four of these steam traps, the expanding cartridges of which were made from rubber tubing, were installed experimentally in the office of Dr. Gruenther, Professor at Stevens Institute, Hoboken, N.J, who was a personal friend and associate of Lewis Sanders, then Vice-President of Sarco, N.Y. They failed due to bursting of the rubber sleeves, whereupon Dr. Gruenther suggested the use of helical metal tubing which had been invented and patented by Solomon Frank of Frankfurt in 1896.

Sarco passed on this suggestion to Sandvoss who immediately applied for a patent in Germany without any recognition of New York.

This was the origin of the Sarco Steam Trap.Almost simultaneously Warren Webster of Philadelphia started using annular metal bellows in radiator traps.Using the suggestion passed on to Sandvoss he started making a series of devices using Frank's invented helical tubing the patent on which had expired.

Sarco owed nothing to Sandvoss or his Company, Samson Apparatobau Akt. Ges.The name Sarco was invented in 1909 by Gustav Binz who was for years an employee of Sarco but at the time worked for Sanders Rehders & Co. Ltd. of London, England, who used the firm's initials S.... for Sarco.

The Samson Company has made many misrepresentations.The invention of steam traps using helical corrugated tubing was solely that of Dr. Gruenther of Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.

[411]

J. SERVICE:This wasn't a full-time job at that time.There just wasn't that much export business. So I was also given the job of handling government contracts, particularly navy.Practically every navy ship that was built had some of our traps on it, so we were bidding on those.

But basically it was exports.Eventually I had to make trips to South America, Europe, particularly South America.I made two trips to Cuba, I think, and a couple trips to Puerto Rico.

J. SERVICE:There were some discouraging periods, especially when I first started in Sarco.It wasn't very exciting work, and the export business wasn't very much.There was a feeling I should get some experience with selling.They wanted me to go out and do some calling on potential customers.But they didn't want me to interfere with anybody else's territory.Different people, salesmen, had certain customers, so what I was doing was what was called "cold turkey" calling.

You go in on somebody who may be a prospect, some manufacturer or dry cleaning establishment or something like this, who was not already a Sarco customer.I did it over in Brooklyn for a while, and this was, you know, discouraging work.I found I wasn't a very successful salesman.

One day after lunch I was standing looking into the window of Altmans's, which is almost across the street from the Empire State Building, just one block over I think from Empire State, and heard my name called.It was the secretary, the Foreign Service girl who had been in Washington and had been assigned to me as secretary when we were getting our case ready for the Loyalty Security Board.She'd had her two years in the field and had just come back.Just by chance she happened to be passing by and saw me.We went and walked in the park.

I think that was about the worst period, the first six months or so.

LEVENSON:Was this a depression that you were going through?

J.SERVICE:Oh, I suppose you could call it that, yes.The job just seemed to be a dead-end job, not really getting anywhere.Later on things picked up.

LEVENSON:Did you feel yourself at much of a disadvantage in having little technical experience except for architectural drafting?

[412]

J. SERVICE:Well, yes and no.I've always been a reasonably good problem solver, whether it s understanding a steam trap or what is needed to meet a market demand.It wasn't terribly high level.There were some technical aspects, of course, but even there, one could learn fairly easily.

If your customer wants to know how big a trap is going to be needed, say on a water heater or something like that, it's fairly simple to figure out the size of the tank and the amount of hot water he requires at such and such a temperature an hour.From that you figure out how many BTUs you need, British Thermal Units.Then you know how much steam you're going to need.That gives you the amount of condensate, and the size of the trap.

I learned to use a slide rule to do these calculations.It was very effective on field calls.In Cuba I visited all the sugar factories the whole length of the island.Sugar factories use a lot of steam traps.The heat source for the boiling down of the cane juice is steam.

One problem was that there are a lot of different types of traps.A lot of the maintenance or technical supervisors and our sales people abroad simply didn't recognize the suitability of one trap for one application but not for another.

I remember going into one sugar factory in Cuba.I was escorted by the salesman from our local representative in Havana.We said we were from Sarco.He said, "Oh, Sarco! I know Sarco." He went back and dug around in the back of the storeroom and brought out a big box full of traps. He said, "Sarco traps, no good!"They'd all been ruined.

I asked him about steam conditions, distribution lines, whether or not he had superheat.They did have some superheated steam.He was trying to use thermostatic traps, and they cannot operate on superheat conditions.It's just death on them.He needed another type of trap, what we call a bucket trap.

Jack Improves a Multipurpose Thermodynamic Steam Trap

J. SERVICE: I realized very early that we should try to get more of an all-purpose trap that could be used under all kinds of conditions where the technical level wasn't very high.This was one reason why I started pushing what we called the thermodynamic trap, because this was a simple, rugged trap that could operate under almost any conditions.

[413]

J. SERVICE: The so-called "thermodynamic" trap was a special type which Sarco had been producing in small quantities.As I recall, the only customer was the U.S. Navy. The body was cast steel.There was only one moving part:a stainless steel disk.It could tolerate superheat, operate in any position, accept very high pressure (as well as low), and stand up to almost any abuse or non-expert installation.Of course, there were some disadvantages.The cast steel body was heavy, cumbersome, and very expensive.On flashing condensate, the trap would shut off (close) at about 30°F.below saturated steam temperature.This reduced its efficiency for many applications--where the process may require that the trap maintain the highest possible temperature in the system by not closing until saturated steam temperature is reached.

In fact, in order to prevent the trap from holding up condensate for too long a period (until it could cool enough for the trap to open in its normal way), the disk (which was the closing device) had a bleed slot across its lower face, which seated across the outlet.The effect of this was that there was a very small continuous outflow of condensate (or steam, if no condensate was present).This steam outflow, though small, represented a waste of heat.

Furthermore, another manufacturer had a trap (actually quite different from ours in operating principle) which in fact depended on a continuous, varying flow between two chambers.This bleed through was written into his patent specifications.On this basis (despite the basic difference in the traps), the other manufacturer had for some time been threatening Mr. Wells with a suit for patent infringement.Wells had acquired the thermodynamic trap somewhat informally (it had been developed by a man in Australia) and had no American or other patent.

Mr. Wells abhorred the idea of a lawsuit.And he may also have disliked the prospective of lawyer fees and other costs.At any rate, he asked me to take over the fairly voluminous files, including patent searches and reports,that had apparently been accumulating for some years.I was to advise him what Sarco (he) should do.

It did not take much study to realize that the only point of contention was the bleed slot.If we could eliminate this, the other manufacturer would have no basis for complaint.The question was whether (and how) this could be done.Furthermore, the elimination would have to be done without impairing the already rather low efficiency of the trap--in other words, by causing the trap to operate even further below the temperature of saturated steam.Finally, by this time, I had been in the business long enough to realize that cast steel bodies was an

[414]

J. SERVICE:old-fashioned, high cost, low volume method of production.The competitor who was trying to sue us was using bodies from stainless steel bar stock, which also facilitated the use of automated machinery for boring and cutting.

Remaking the trap from stainless steel bar stock and without the bleed slot would not only save us from a lawsuit.It should enable us to expand the sales of the trap in the U.S., beyond its current small volume use by the navy for special high pressure installations.Most importantly, in my export-oriented mind, it would give us a relative foolproof, all-purpose trap which should be well suited for general sale in export markets where technical know-how was a problem.

As I became absorbed in this whole patent study, and as these visions began to unfold, I talked to the Sarco sales engineers (who I was working alongside and lunching with every day). They were dubious.I then tried some of the engineers at our factory in Bethlehem, including the man who was nominally in charge of development. My suggestion was that the existing proportions of the trap need not be considered immutable.There were a number of variables:the size (area) of both inlet and outlet; the diameter (area) of the valve disk; and the volume of the holding chamber above the disk.If the ratios between these various elements were experimented with, it should be possible to alter (and maybe improve) the operation of the trap--and find a way of making it work satisfactorily without the bleed slot.

No one seemed interested in doing the experimenting.When Wells set up his own manufacturing, soon after World War I, his factory manager and chief engineer had been a secretive, but technically highly regarded man who he brought over from England. This man, who had died only a few years before this, had done the original design and testing of the thermodynamic trap (from the rough description which had come from Australia via Wells' British company).No one in Sarco knew the details of his tests and development work.But since he was a careful and competent engineer, no one thought there was likely to be any good result from redoing his work.

Through Oberlin friends (John Reid and his wife), we had become well acquainted with a professor of hydraulic engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic.When I talked to "Midge" [Ernst Leland Midgette] about my ideas, he became much interested.It was not far removed from his own specialty of hydraulics.He started calculations (far beyond me, of course) on the potential of changing the ratios of the variables.Furthermore (and very providentially) he had laboratory and shop facilities.Eventually, he produced a small working model.At least he was convinced it would work (since he was in hydraulics, his laboratory had no high pressure steam installation for us to try it out.).

[415]

J. SERVICE:Because of the work Midgette had done, we decided to make a disclosure to a patent attorney.Wells, who in effect was the sole owner of all his companies, had had a habit of putting patents in his own name even though the work may have been done by engineering staff in the factory.It seemed only fair to me that Midge have this protection.At this point, I was also not sure where my own interests might lie.

We gave the working model to Sarco.The general attitude was: "So what!"But they did send it down to the factory to test.(It was rather typical of some of the people Wells had working for him, and I suppose of the general skepticism, that neither Midge nor I were notified when the tests would be made so that we might be present.)At any rate, the result was general astonishment. The trap operated without a bleed slot.But it also operated much closer to saturated steam temperature, and had a capacity several times greater than the existing trap of comparable size.

With the tests so encouraging--in fact, exciting--the sales people assumed that the factory would go into production as soon as possible.So I had to tell them that, in view of all the work done by Midgette (after their own non-interest), we had already made a legal disclosure to a patent attorney.This tied Sarco's hands, and all hell broke loose.I immediately became a traitor and worse, if possible.

LEVENSON:Why did all hell break loose?

J. SERVICE:Not so much Wells as other people.Wells, at that point, did not realize the value of what we'd done.Other people felt that I was trying to pull a fast one, and to some extent I was pulling a fast one.I hoped to get something out of this certainly, and I wanted my friend to get something out of it.

We even talked very tentatively of starting a separate company to manufacture the trap for Sarco. That didn't get anywhere, and there would have been a lot of problems anyway.I've got a paper that Joe Rauh signed saying that he would be glad to invest $20,000, [laughter] but I'm not sure whether it was serious or not.But we would have had to raise capital and start a factory and so on. We would have been dependent pretty much on Sarco.

It was a thing that we simply didn't want to have taken away with no compensation at all.We finally did agree to give, assign the patent rights to the company.

LEVENSON: In exchange ?

[416]

J. SERVICE: In exchange for nothing really.They just agreed to employ Midgette as a consultant on the patent and in the development of the trap.He got some consultant fees out of it, not a great deal.

As the story will unfold, of course, I eventually got cut in on the ownership of Sarco.But Wells would never make any connection between the two.Wells felt at this time that people would not be really interested in the small trap.If they were buying a trap, they wanted to really know they were getting something.He felt that they would prefer the old trap, which was far more expensive for us to make and far more cumbersome and heavy and less efficient.Our trap eventually made the company a very prosperous company.

Negotiates Contract with Steelworkers' Union and Avoids a Strike Against Sarco

J. SERVICE:For several years, Wells had me join the management team at our factory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to discuss the yearly union contract.One year, we had reached an impasse, long sessions with representatives of the union as well as the union agent, and getting nowhere.

LEVENSON:Which union was this?

J. SERVICE:Steelworkers.We all sat at a big table.Everybody had made speeches and taken firm positions.We reached an impasse, and everybody shrugged their shoulders and said, "Well, we're going to have a strike."

My lawyers, Rhetts and Reilly, were labor lawyers.I talked to them and gave them a copy of our contract.A number of times in the past we'd had these strikes, and then Wells had always caved in and eventually met the union terms, because he couldn't stand to have the factory closed for very long.

Reilly, I guess it was, said, "Look, you know, the best way to do this is to try to have a private meeting with the union agent, work out terms, and then have it ratified by the plenary session with all the representatives."

But, he said, "You've got a terrible contract," because we had never paid any attention--There were a lot of things in there that are not normal, too favorable to the union side.So, he suggested, "Be somewhat generous on the wage, particularly if you can justify it by productivity and so on, but try to tighten up your contract."

[417]

J. SERVICE:I suggested to Wells that it was foolish for us to accept the inevitability of a strike. He told me to go down and try to fix it up.I went to Bethlehem and called up the union representative and asked him to come around to the hotel and talk that evening.Then the next day, we reached a settlement and avoided the strike.

LEVENSON: Jack Kahn says that you were chosen to do this because you were the only executive who had worked in the factory?

J. SERVICE:Oh, I don't think that's true.I think I was the only one who had worked in the factory, but I don't really think that had very much to do with it.The people did know me from the fact that I had worked there.Of course, they knew the other management people too.

This labor negotiation was very much resented, particularly by the manager of the factory.He felt he had been pushed aside--for which he can hardly be blamed.

LEVENSON: Your career exemplifies a great deal of the rhetoric in the English political system, at least up till the postwar period which suggests that a good liberal arts education qualifies a man to do anything, and that the top ambition of people, at least in England, should be either the Foreign Service or the Treasury.If you can do this, you can succeed in any walk of life.Any comments?

J. SERVICE:Yes.I would look at it that Foreign Service experience qualifies you for a great many things--the Foreign Service is a generalist occupation, normally speaking--and if you're a successful Foreign Service officer, why, you can do many other things.Lawyers will argue the same thing about the profession of law.

But I agree with you that a good liberal arts education does have great value in preparing one for Foreign Service.

Denied Lease in Apartment Building Owned by Equitable Insurance

J. SERVICE: To go back and pick up the story, Caroline stayed in Washington and in the spring we had to find an apartment.I answered an ad in the paper put in by a man who was living in something called Fordham Hill, big high-rise apartments up in Fordham.He wanted to sublet his apartment.

[418]

J. SERVICE:I went up to talk to him.He was a very pleasant, young Jewish doctor if I remember right.We agreed; everything was fine; I liked the apartment, but his lease required him to get approval of the owners.The next step was that the Equitable people--Equitable Insurance owned it--wanted me to provide some references, some information.

I gave three references.One was Dean Rusk.One was this man I'd been staying with for a while up in Scarsdale who at that time was head administrator for the Ford Foundation.He'd formerly been a chief administrative man in the Department of Commerce.The third was an old friend, Marty [Professor C. Martin] Wilbur at Columbia.

The only thing the company did was to come down to Sarco and ask if this was the man who'd been fired by the State Department.We were then informed that the apartment was no longer available.

LEVENSON: That must've been a terrible blow.

J. SERVICE:I think this probably made me madder than anything else in this period.I mobilized people in the State Department and my lawyers, and John Reid who was a member of an influential law firm in Washington.

The Equitable people were absolutely adamant.The apartment had not been rented.The man who was wanting to sublet it continued to keep me advised in a friendly way of what was happening.He even pressed the thing himself.But, they said, "There would be complaints from the neighbors because of the type of people that would probably be there," if we were in the apartment.

LEVENSON: What did they mean?

J. SERVICE: I suppose they assumed that I was a wild-eyed political extremist or leftist.The people who actually came to our eventual apartment were often ambassadors and former prime ministers of New Zealand and all sorts of people like this.

At any rate, that was an unhappy episode.Of course, as soon as I could get other insurance I canceled what insurance I had with Equitable.I'd had to convert my Foreign Service group insurance to straight life, but later we found another insurance company that would sell us term insurance.So we broke off with Equitable.I was terribly annoyed that they didn't ask me why I was discontinuing my policy. [laughter]

[419]

First Court Hearing:Judge Curran Finds Firing Legal Under "Unlimited Discretion of the Secretary of State"

J. SERVICE:The first hearing on my case was before Judge [Edward Matthew] Curran in June, 1955.Just before we were heard, the Supreme Court had decided the Peters case.Peters was a doctor who worked in the government.

His case was one like mine where the Loyalty Review Board had assumed jurisdiction.It had been decided favorably by the department board, and then the Loyalty Review Board had taken the case over and reversed the lower board.His appeal was challenging the legality of the Loyalty Review Board's action.

The Supreme Court had upheld Peters.This was, of course, exactly the point that we had argued right in the very beginning when we tried to get the State Department to give us twenty-four hours' delay to present this argument.Curran had no choice--he had to apply this to our case.

But he decided that it really didn't make any difference.The action by the Loyalty Review Board had to be expunged from the record--it being null and void--but the Secretary of State had the right, unlimited right, to discharge me under something called the McCarran rider, which was a rider to all the appropriation bills.

This was the point at which the government started to argue that my firing had not been on loyalty or security, but had simply been at the unlimited discretion of the Secretary of State.

We already had a letter from Humelsine, saying that it had been purely because of the Loyalty Review Board decision.Eventually we discovered that Acheson had given an affidavit saying that
it had been done purely because of the Loyalty Review Board.

We got a lot of friendly letters of congratulations, but from our point of view it wasn't really a victory because I didn't have my job back.Curran still upheld the firing.The next thing was to go to the Court of Appeals, which we did in 1956.

[420]

An Oily and Unctuous McCarthy Charges Jack with Being an Employee of the CIA

J. SERVICE:This was about the time that we actually were called for a hearing by McCarthy in New York.McCarthy was then head of something called the Government Operations Committee. This was when he and [Roy] Cohn and [David] Schine were leading a high, wide, and handsome career investigating USIA, United States Information Agency libraries all over Europe and this sort of thing.

LEVENSON:What happened at the hearing?

J. SERVICE: It was a strange performance.I got a call at the office.Somebody speaking very quickly said his name was Cohn.I dealt with several people named Cohn.One of the jobbers that I often had calls from was a man named Cohn.I didn't really realize who it was.He said, "We want you to come down here and answer some questions."

I said, "Wait a minute.Who are you and what is this?"

He said he was Roy Cohn, counsel for the Senate Committee on Government Operations, and they were having a hearing down at the courthouse in Foley Square, U.S. Courthouse, and wanted me to come right down.

I said, "Well, I can't come right down now."

He said, "You can get on the subway and be down here in fifteen minutes."

I said, "I think I've got a right to have a lawyer."

He said, "Call your lawyer and tell him to meet you here."

I said, "My lawyer is in Washington."

He said, "Well, if you're going to be unpleasant about it, the committee members will have to wait over then till tomorrow.But, we expect you here at ten o clock,"-- I think it was--"in the morning," whatever the hour was. "This is a telephone subpoena."

LEVENSON: I never heard of that.

J. SERVICE:So, I said, "Well, okay.I'll try to get a hold of my lawyer and see if he can come from Washington.We'll try to be there."I didn't make any firm commitment.

[421]

J. SERVICE:The Sarco people were alarmed.Sarco lawyers were the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst.But the man who handled most of the Sarco business was a partner named Leo Rosen. [phone rings; tape off]

As I mentioned before, I was handling government sales, particularly to the navy.So we assumed that he was going to attack the company or something like that for employing me on this thing.

Actually, I saw no government documents or classified plans.We would get only a request to bid on a certain number of traps of such and such a size and variety.We just sent in a bid.

Of course, I wanted to get people from my firm in Washington. Rhetts was on a trip in England, so Reilly said he would come up.We met for breakfast at the Biltmore Hotel I think, right near Grand Central.Rosen joined us. The two lawyers and I didn't know what to expect, but the lawyers said that I should start in by saying that I was appearing voluntarily, in other words that we didn't recognize any telephonic subpoena.

They had someone on just before me.We didn't hear that, of course.It was a closed meeting.We were finally brought in.I was asked to give my name and address.

Then, as instructed by the lawyers, I carried on saying that I was appearing voluntarily. The questioning was done by Roy Cohn, and this set Roy Cohn off.He became quite irate, saying that there was no need for such a statement and I was there at the invitation of the committee, that certainly a telephonic request had considerable weight.

McCarthy saw what the furor was all about, and stepped in in a very judicial manner, and said we didn't need to waste time on this matter, that I was there and, of course, realized that an invitation by a committee was something that shouldn't be lightly treated.

Then he announced that they had a signed affidavit--I didn't know there was any other kind except a signed affidavit--that I was actually an employee of the CIA, and had been one since my discharge from the Department.

LEVENSON:What?

J. SERVICE:An employee of the CIA.Well, this staggered us.[laughter]This was so unexpected and so bizarre that I think we all showed considerable surprise.We said I wasn't--had no connection with the CIA.The CIA had nothing to do with my employment.

[422]

J. SERVICE: This was in a period when he was trying to find something to hang the CIA with.He had a great row on with the CIA and was trying to get some information on them.

It's true that at one time when the State Department was trying to find someplace for me to go, I had talked to somebody in the CIA. So, maybe somebody in the CIA--because the people in the CIA leaked too--just assumed that my working for a steam trap company was such an absurd idea that it must be a cover.I don't know.

Anyway, we agreed to provide all sorts of affidavits that we sold nothing to the CIA, received no pay, or had no dealings with the CIA, in other words the CIA had not nominally bought steam traps to pay my salary or anything like that.We went away somewhat bemused and mystified by the whole deal.

LEVENSON:What was your impression of McCarthy at this period?Was he slipping??

J. SERVICE: He was particularly loathsome, I thought, at that time.But, I don't remember thinking that he was slipping.I never thought he was very high, you know.His manner was very oily and unctuous.I think he realized very quickly that somebody had given him a bum piece of information.I don't think that he was inclined to press the matter very much.

Schine took almost no part in the ceremonies.He was there. Cohn was more or less pushed aside when we got in this initial hassle over the telephone subpoena.After that I think McCarthy did all the talking, and it didn't last very long.We agreed to provide material that we had not any dealings with the CIA, and that was about it.

Jack's Mother Dies

J. SERVICE:We said a good deal in the early stages here about my mother.I ought to mention the fact of her death.She had a stroke in the summer of '54, and we brothers all went out to California.She was living at a retirement colony for Christian workers, missionaries and so on, in Claremont, California.She had a little cottage there which she had built, under terms that you give it to the retirement estate when you die.

There was a little hospital--a fairly simple hospital--for the retirement colony.Instead of hiring full-time special nurses, the three of us sons took turns caring for her, just as we had for our father.

[423]

J. SERVICE: As soon as my brother Dick, who was in Brussels, arrived, she insisted the doctor stop any more medication, any attempts to keep her going.But, nonetheless she did keep going.

After about two and a half weeks or so she was getting better, so we all had to disperse.I had a lot of talks with her.She told me a great deal about herself and her marriage and life.

She gave us instructions that her ashes were to go back to China to be put beside my father's ashes in my sister's grave in Chungking.

She said that beside her desk we would find a box with a notice that she'd prepared for friends, a poem really about her death. She had all the envelopes addressed, three hundred and sixty some.

LEVENSON:Remarkable.Thank you, Jack.Shall we pause?

J. SERVICE: No, let's go on.The only thing to be inserted was the date.They were all ready to go.She had a second stroke, and I went back a second time in October.But she lingered on, and I had to leave.My brother Bob, the forester, was the only one there when she died.They had memorial services just as she wished.

LEVENSON:Have you been able to carry out her wishes about her ashes?

J. SERVICE:That's a sad story in a way.California law was very restrictive at that time.In California they have to be put in some sort of a proper repository.Bob simply said that her wishes were that they were not to stay in California.So he mailed them to me in New York. We kept them for fourteen years or so, more than that.By about '69 I finally decided it was hopeless to expect to take them back to China.So Bob and I took them up and scattered them on a Sierra mountaintop.

LEVENSON: She loved the mountains.

J. SERVICE: A few years later--but no one ever could have foreseen it then--they could have been taken back to China. When we did get back to China in '71, the cemetery in Chungking had disappeared.So they couldn't really have gone in the grave of my father.

[423a]

Mrs. Grace Boggs Service's death announcement and poem, written by her.

625 MAYFLOWER ROAD
CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA

Written March, 1943
Set up, printed and signed September, 1943
(October 20, 1954)

A whisper stirred old pine-trees,
A fleeting shadow swept a wall,
Light foot-steps climbed a mountain,
A scent of honey over all...
Long echoes filled a river canyon,
A glacier moved its inch today.
Did you, by chance, look out the window,
Or did a lady pass your way?
Today's the day appointed!
So while the world rolls smoothly on,
I've slipped away to Bob, my husband.
No one should grieve that I am gone.

[424]

Source of Hurley's Charges Revealed at John Davies' Hearings:From Tai Li via "Mary" Miles

J. SERVICE:About this time [John] Davies was going through his hearings.I think this was early '54.The ground rules had changed.As I mentioned before, you no longer had a departmental board.It had to be all people completely outside your department so there would be no possibility of favoritism, special treatment, old school tie, or anything like that.

He had a former Inspector General from the army, and the other people on his panel were from the Small Business Administration, a technical bureau, and so on.None of them had any understanding about the situation in China.

Hurley had agreed to appear, but this was because the defendant, or his lawyer, no longer had the right to do any cross questioning.It was apparent as Hurley testified that he had Davies and me completely confused in his mind; many of his accusations and a lot of things he was saying applied not to John but to me.

John asked me if I would come up to try to straighten things out.Of course, I did so gladly.It was during these hearings that we found out the basis of a lot of the charges that Hurley had been making, these accusations of my giving copies of my reports to the Communists and conspiring with Teddy White and so on.This had been fed to him by the Chinese, by Tai Li, I imagine through "Mary" Miles through the navy connection.

Hurley had been told, and had agreed, not to say anything about it to anyone.So he had not said anything about it even to the counter-intelligence people in headquarters.He'd given all the papers back, so we've never been able to see what sort of stuff really it was.Hurley's memory was not very good.He was very fuzzy.

LEVENSON:Where are those papers now, do you guess?

J. SERVICE:Hurley gave them back to "Mary" Miles or Tai Li.So I assume they've been destroyed.Hurley said he did not keep them.

Anyway, this was an absolutely hopeless situation.I was depressed by these ground rules.It seemed to me that Davies had no chance, which was true.I myself was attacked very strongly in the board hearings for having been fired.In other words, my credibility was questioned.

[425]

LEVENSON:How did you take that?

J. SERVICE:I made some attempt to point out that it had not been on loyalty.But you can't really defend yourself.The fact is you've been fired, and that's an obvious fact.

Life in New York

J. SERVICE: We don't need to talk much about life in New York.We were in an apartment house out in Kew Gardens.

You remember the Equitable Life Insurance people refused to rent me an apartment?Incidentally, there's quite a file on that which will be in the papers.So, when I then looked for another apartment and found one in Kew Gardens, I went to the company's head office in downtown New York to make sure there would be no hitch, no trouble.

It was a Jewish company, and I saw the head man.He laughed when I told him who I was and why I wanted to be sure he knew.His attitude was, "So what?" He simply wanted to know if I had a job.

We moved into a Jewish community.This was sort of, how shall we say, a turnabout for that wrenching experience with Jewish immigration in Shanghai, that we moved into a refugee community in Kew Gardens. German was often heard on the streets, and practically all the people in the apartment house were Jewish.

Some of them we got to know quite well.One of them helped us get some term insurance.Many of these people were most enthusiastic, most touched, when we won our case in the Supreme Court.This was something that they thought was absolutely terrific.

The school that Philip went to was almost entirely Jewish.

Up to this point I had known very few Jews.There were none in the Foreign Service.My missionary background didn't put me in contact with any.I'd had a friend in Chungking, Sol Adler, but that was about all.We never found any discrimination or unpleasantness from any of the Jewish people we knew, with the conspicuous exception of Roy Cohn who was working for McCarthy.

[426]

J. SERVICE:Quite a few of the people I dealt with, jobbing business and so on, knew who I was and sometimes they would comment on the fact or something of this sort but always in a friendly way.I never had any unpleasantness.

Well's wife was Jewish, and a lot of the people in Sarco were Jewish.So was Ruth Greenfield, the woman that I worked with who'd been handling the routine side of the export business.She's continued to be a very good friend of ours, although she might well have resented my coming in, because she could have expected to move up and do some of the work I did.

LEVENSON:And about Philip, was this any problem for him?Did he ever feel that he would have preferred to be like the majority of his school mates?

J. SERVICE:I don't think that he had any particular feelings on it.He belonged to a Cub Scout pack.That had its interesting sides.It was practically all Jewish also.Most of them were recent immigrants, trying very hard to be American and have their sons be American.

I was astonished, after my own Boy Scout experience in Shanghai, to find out how nationalistic this whole thing had become with saluting the flag, and great ceremony about who had the honor of carrying the flag, and so on.We hadn't had anything like that in the Boy Scout troop in Shanghai.

Through some of these people in the apartment house I got recruited or interested in working for a Democratic group in Queens that was pushing [Adlai] Stevenson in the 1952 campaign.I canvassed the neighborhood, did precinct work, passing out literature, things like this.

It was a non-regular Democratic group.The Democratic (Tammany Hall) establishment in New York was not very savory, and not very enthusiastic about Stevenson.So, this was a sort of a grassroots activity, very much like the C[alifornia] D[emocratic] C[ouncil] movement.

After the campaign, when Stevenson had been defeated, they decided they wanted to maintain some nucleus of an organization, keep themselves alive for the next campaign.They asked various people to sign up, so I agreed to put my name down.

One Saturday morning a group of these people asked if they could come around to our apartment. They hemmed and hawed for a while.I sensed their dilemma, their problem.So, I said, "If you're worried about having me down as one of the members or founding members of this new group, I'd be very happy to withdraw."

[427]

J. SERVICE:They all breathed a sigh of relief.But it was a great embarrassment to my Jewish friend who had been urging me to sign up.

LEVENSON:What went on inside you when that occurred?

J. SERVICE:Oh, by this time I was sort of used to it.

LEVENSON:Did you get angry?

J. SERVICE:Not against these people, no. There wasn't any point in being angry.I said, "Isn't this your problem?"They agreed it was.I said, "Sure, I don't want to make trouble.I'll withdraw."

It was a belt-tightening period.I was making about $12,000 in the State Department, and Mr. Wells offered me $9,000, but mentioned there would be some bonus if things went well.So, I accepted the job on those terms.The bonus was usually $1,000, and sometimes as high as $2,000. Obviously, we had to make quite a serious reduction in our scale of living, because we had other expenses at this time.

LEVENSON:What were the worst effects of the belt-tightening on you and the family?

J. SERVICE:We rented a fairly modest apartment and had to be pretty careful on magazine subscriptions and entertainment, things like that.Caroline did some work to try to bring in a little extra income.I think she s probably told about her part-time work.

We were able to send the children to Oberlin, but partly because they got some scholarship help. Bob got a scholarship.He couldn't have gone to Oberlin, I'm sure, without having gotten a scholarship.He also got a scholarship to Magdalen College School in England that Caroline has probably mentioned.My mother sent some money.

We got along.Wells, when he later on retired and put me in as president of Sarco International, told me to fix my own bonus.But that put me in an odd position, so I said we'd continue the arrangements we'd had before.

I forgot to say when we were talking about finances in New York, that the first year we were there was particularly tough.Not only the salary was small, and we had to wait until the end of the year to get a bonus, but also I got a payment from the Department for accumulated leave.In the Foreign Service you could accumulate up to 180 days leave.

[428]

J. SERVICE:Since I hadn't used the leave, why, the value of the leave was paid to me in a lump sum, which gave us a terrible shock when we came to pay income tax for the year, because the tax bill was much larger than we had anticipated.

I had some embroideries, quite a number of embroideries.My father was very keen on Chinese embroidery.He had bought a lot of these, picked them up in Chengtu in the years after the 1911 revolution.There were old gowns and so on, some of them very good.

Well, [laughing] the market for Chinese embroideries and old Mandarin gowns wasn't very good, because we only were able to sell them for $200, which sounds ridiculous now.But, this was 1953.

Then, my brother, who had been stationed in Moscow and gone on leave into Germany, had picked up a Leica camera which he'd sent me, which I had never used.We sold the Leica to help pay our income tax.The children had board jobs at college and worked in the summers.Sarco was able to help, and other people.We managed to get them jobs every summer.Anyway, that was no great hardship.I'd done the same:board job and work in the summers.So, they carried on the tradition.

What I think we missed a good deal about New York was that it's so different from life in the Foreign Service or even in Washington, D.C.In the Foreign Service generally you're in a rather close and cohesive group. You see each other socially outside the office as well as inside the office.

In New York everyone disperses after the office, so that you're all living in separate suburbs with almost no getting together outside.You have an annual Christmas party, which your wife does not go to.Otherwise there's no socializing.

We tended to leave New York weekends.We had friends up in Connecticut, some cousins and friends in New Haven.People like the Silbers lived in New Jersey.Ed Snow lived up in Kloster Kloster's just north of Palisades on the New York side of the river.

We had to make some choice of friends, whether we were going to see some people or not.People like Snow and the Silbers.Fritz Silber has always been left in politics; he was an active supporter of [Henry] Wallace in the 1948 campaign.People like that we decided to maintain our friendship with.

[429]

J. SERVICE:Other people we didn't.The Adlers had gone to England by this time.We didn't try to keep up some friendships.For instance, people who had been associated with Jaffe.

LEVENSON:How much of it was your fear of "guilt by association" and how much of it was sensitivity to the risks of people knowing you?

J. SERVICE:The question of people knowing me I left up to them.That's why I said that the initiative, generally speaking, had to come from them.There wasn't much question of worry about guilt by association.I simply didn't want to have anything to do with the Jaffe connection. That was a very traumatic experience as far as I was concerned, and it was one that I wanted to forget about.

I didn't have any real possibility of seeing Adler until after I was reinstated and went to Liverpool. But he realized it was not a good idea, and I certainly didn't think it was a good idea to take any steps because I didn't know what Adler's reasons for going to England were.Although he'd been cleared in the departmental loyalty board, when things got hotter he had left.

People like Snow and so on, definitely there was no fear of guilt by association, or I didn't care. This was a risk that we were prepared to take.Snow was being accused in those days of being Communist or pro-Communist.There was a campaign against his wife, and she was blacklisted.

People like the Silbers, Priscilla Yard's husband--the Yard family I mentioned before--we just had to make some decisions, and this was a risk that we were prepared to take, if it was a risk.

Jack Buys in to Sarco

J. SERVICE:Wells retired in early 1955.He'd been talking about it for some time before that, and there had been various plans for his retirement.Apparently he actually wanted to make me president of the company.But, he found--perhaps to his surprise but not to anyone else--that this united the various factions in the company like nothing else ever could.

His methods were rather roundabout.He never liked to have anyone clearly as second in command.He had three or four people that he played off.All of them thought they had been promised the job of sales manager.Most of them at one time or another had thought that they were going to be made president when he retired.

[430]

J. SERVICE:So for me to be brought in as a newcomer and then for him to suggest that I be made president--he thought there would be advantages I suppose in my being more neutral, impartial; I don't know--but anyway this was something he couldn't do.

A deal was finally worked out.He wanted to have me join the new group that would be taking over.It was a very complicated arrangement that was worked out with the lawyers.We would buy one of his companies, and then that company, after we had bought the stock in it, would then buy the other companies, except for Sarco International which he kept himself.

It required an investment.I was to get one-eleventh of the stock.That one-eleventh was to be $5,000.The company actually at this time wasn't making very much money.Looking back, it appears to have been a very favorable deal.Actually, it was no giveaway because the company was just barely keeping going.It paid no dividends.He had never paid dividends.That was part of his policy.He took the money out in other ways rather than dividends, because dividends have to be taxed.

Wells offered to loan me the $5,000.It would be a loan, but actually I would be holding the stock for him.I would be his inside man, inside the new board of directors, to watch things for him and report to him.

It just happened that we were having dinner with the Silbers when this came up.I mentioned before how the Yard family has come into my life at various times.I was describing the situation, and Priscilla Yard Silber said, "Well, I could loan you $5,000."

So, I took her up on it and surprised Wells the next day by saying that I would be very glad to take up the stock, the one-eleventh share, but that I would pay for it myself.So of course, [chuckling] having made the offer, he could hardly withdraw it.

LEVENSON:Did he query the source of your funds?

J. SERVICE:No, no, no.He was a good business man, and he didn't raise any questions about that.I'm sure he knew perfectly well why I preferred outright purchase.

LEVENSON:Why did you?

J. SERVICE: To be my own man, to have it independently, not to be holding it for him.

So I became one-eleventh owner of the Sarco companies and one of the stockholders.It soon developed that another man named Gumming and I were the minority.The other four stockholders

[431]

J. SERVICE:formed a very tight group.They finally bought out one of the group, and the remaining three tried to force us out in various ways.

We eventually had to start a lawsuit, because they tried to sell the company to an outside firm, but on terms that would be very beneficial to them.They would stay on and run the company with large promises of retirement and salary and so on.But, we were able to go to court and get the thing quashed.That was in '61.

Eventually we sold our stock to the Canadian Sarco company. There were Sarco companies all over the map.The Canadian Sarco company was having a very hard time with the New York people.

Wells had left affairs between these various companies in rather a confused state.A lot of the operating agreements and contracts were not very clearly drawn.Sarco Canada did some manufacturing, but was largely dependent on the New York company for materials and supplies. They were anxious to get Cumming's and my minority stock to give them a foothold inside the company.Thus we were able to sell advantageously.

As I mentioned, when Wells retired he kept the ownership of Sarco International.He had been president.I had been vice- president.When he retired, I became president.We were having more and more problems, operating difficulties, with the small group that was running the main company.We had shared premises with them in the Empire State Building.We moved out over to 20 Park Avenue and ran our own shop.Business at this time started to pick up very rapidly, quite largely because of the thermodynamic trap, the new trap, which was only really coming into production by late 1955.Our sales really mushroomed.

A new Sarco company was started by Wells in Germany.That began to make money.We had royalty agreements with various other companies.Sarco International originally was started with a very small investment.It was just a sales company.But in 1957, Wells sold it to the English company for 100,000 pounds. [laughter]Well, that's neither here nor there.

April. 1956:Failure in the Court of Appeals

J. SERVICE: To go back to the court business, the district court had ruled the action of the Loyalty Review Board to be invalid.But still upheld the legality of my discharge.So we took it to the appeals court.In April, 1956, they had a hearing in Washington--three judges, very unsympathetic.

[432]

J. SERVICE: They went all the way with the government, that I could be fired for any reason, with no justification, at the will or whim of the secretary.Therefore, the firing should not be considered as either for loyalty or security.It was just because the secretary of state decided to fire me. That was announced in June. Then we decided to try for the Supreme Court.

LEVENSON:How had you expected the verdict to come out in the appeals court?

J. SERVICE:We had a little hope, but we drew some rather poor judges.Decisions in the court of appeals may be influenced by which judges you get, and we didn't get a favorable draw.The cards just didn't come right.Some judges we felt might have been a bit more sympathetic to our arguments.The ones we got just didn't see any merit at all in our argument. They were unanimous:three to nothing against us.

Appeal to the Supreme Court

J. SERVICE:Ed Rhetts was determined to go on.He felt he needed some help.He'd never argued a case in the Supreme Court.He'd never been admitted to Supreme Court practice.The first step is to apply for a writ of certiorari.

He had a friend in Washington named Warner Gardner.His practice was mostly admiralty law, but he had had a lot of experience in Supreme Court practice.He had a young lawyer in his office named Vern Countryman, who actually did most of the work on preparing the petition for a writ.

The petition was submitted in the fall of '56, and was accepted.In other words, at least four judges on the Supreme Court, I think, have to be in favor of hearing the case, of granting the petition for a writ.

LEVENSON:Now, this was the Warren court, which we know was a liberal court.

J. SERVICE:Right.

LEVENSON:So, you had expected the petition to be successful?

J. SERVICE:We thought we had a very good chance.We thought some people on the court would be favorable.Whether or not we'd have four or not, we weren't so sure.

[433]

J. SERVICE:Then we had to get down and work on the brief.I got into the act here in a way because the government was arguing, you see, that a discharge, such as mine, could be at the sole and unrestricted discretion of the secretary of state.Warner Gardner felt that we had to base our case largely on the fact that the Department of State had some regulations covering this whole question; that when you have regulations, as long as they are in force they have to be followed; that the Tydings committee had been informed of these regulations and had accepted them; in fact they made no objection to them; that the report of the Tydings committee had been debated in the full Senate very fully, actually for most of four days I think, and no objections had been made.So we had a case that these facts were known to the Senate and accepted by the Senate.The Senate, if they had objected could have said so, because there was this other McCarran rider which gives the secretary free hand, you see.

I did a good deal of this research.This will all be in the files which I'll give to The Bancroft Library.We don't need to say much about it now, but I went back to the Congressional Record and got all of the debates in the House and showed the number of hours that had been spent, pages in the Congressional Record, the number of senators who had taken part in the debate, and so on.All this is in here.

LEVENSON:When did you do this research?Were you still working full time for Sarco?

J. SERVICE:Yes, but in the evenings and so on.I think I may have taken a couple of days off, because I spent several days in the New York Public Library.I was thrown out of the library when they closed the doors for the evening, and then I went home and wrote a long series of letters.

At any rate, it gave Warner Gardner a chance to say that it was the only case he'd ever had where the client did the most valuable research, because in the decision this was picked up by the Court members!

The Supreme Court Decision:Unanimous in Favor of Jack

J. SERVICE:In April, we had the hearing.We went to Washington.

LEVENSON:What were your feelings appearing before the high court of the land?

[434]

J. SERVICE:You don't "appear," of course.You simply are permitted to sit in the audience.

LEVENSON:Oh yes, I knew that.

J. SERVICE:The argument is purely a legal argument.Well, it was tremendously impressive.It was exciting in a way and awesome. We were, of course, very interested in how it was done-- I'd never seen a Supreme Court action before--and in the questioning which is a very unusual type of proceeding.The judges break in all the time, and it's very difficult for lawyers because of the fact that they can be continually interrupted with interjections of questions by different justices.

It was fairly clear that my lawyer, Rhetts, who argued the case--he did the actual argument--was having a much better time than the government man.The Solicitor General was present.But most of the argument was by the same lawyer who had handled it through the district and appeals courts. Later, he also carried on through the court of claims.He was unyielding and extreme and a very nasty guy.He had trouble with some hard questions on the government's rather extreme contentions.

We didn't know when the decision would come about.It didn't come until just as the court was ending its term.

It was a unanimous decision, which was more than we hoped for.We left the hearing optimistic that we might win by six to three.We didn't know that [Tom] Clark was going to disqualify himself.He sat on the bench, but he disqualified himself.

LEVENSON:Why?

J. SERVICE:He'd been attorney general during the Amerasia case.

[Interview 12:November 4, 1977]

J. SERVICE:One thing that really impressed me was the warmth of Chief Justice Warren.Part of the session on the second day was swearing in new lawyers who had just been admitted to practice before the Supreme Court.This is a rote thing occurring, I suppose, almost every session; yet he did it with impressive sincerity, welcoming these people to practice before the bar in a very warm, human way.

The other thing was the intensity and the intellectual quality of the hearing itself, of the argumentation.We'd had the district court, and then three judges in the appeals court who were very cold and distant.But here you had these nine people, all of them

[434a]

Letter from Caroline Service to her mother describing the Supreme Court proceedings

April 4, 1957

Dearest Mother:Well, it is all over, and I have a great feeling of relief and of hope.Rhetts was splendid.He had his material well organized, he presented it clearly and cogently, and he did not get rattled or show any nervousness--which latter he must surely have felt.I do not see how anyone could help but be nervous before that august Court.Ruth Rhetts said that she shook hands with the Government lawyer after he had presented his side and that she had never felt colder hands.But I want to write a full account of the whole proceedings.

On Sunday, after we had time to talk with Gin and Bob, we decided that Jack and I would go to Washington by train on Sunday evening. This would give Jack at least one office day.Gin, Bob, and Phil would rise at dawn, drive to Washington, and get to Helen and Dick's about noon.There was no way of knowing exactly when the case would come on.The number of cases are scheduled for the week and then they go on one right after the other, but occasionally one is delayed or rescheduled, or something of that sort.Our train to Washington was both slow and late.Dick met us and we got out to the house about midnight.Talked for about an hour and went to bed.Tuesday morning Jack talked with Ed and then went to pick him up about 11 so that they could be at the court at 12.No one really thought our case would come up on Tuesday.I stayed right at Helen's.Talked withDiana by phone and also with Uncle Wes.Diana had told Frankie and Wayne we were coming down and I phonedthem on Wednesday morning as I did not want Frankie, who was probably busy, to think she had to come to the Court.Diana told me she had your letter mother which she would bring out to Helen's that evening.Our plan for the afternoon was that I would meet Jack at Connie Green's about three o'clock and then if the case was on we'd go over to the court.Gin, Philip, and Bob arrived right at noon.After a quick lunch at Helen's, Bob and Gin went off to their places to sleep--Ginny with Diana and Faith, and Bob at the Rauhs'. Unfortunately his old friend Lake had already gone back to the U. of Michigan.About two o clock 1 went to Lisa's with her to check up on her little boy who was sick.We had barely gotten in the door when the phone rang.It was Jack saying that he had just been told his case would be up about three fifteen.We had told the kids to meet us at Connie Green's too at three, but I was able to get hold, of Gin by phone to tell them to come right to Court.Helen went from her house, and Lisa and I got in a taxi and rushed off.The reason for the meeting at Connie Green's was that Connie is now living in a darling little old-fashioned frame house right smack across the street from the back entrance of the Supreme Court.Nothing could have been more convenient.Jack met Lisa and Connie and me there about a quarter to three and we all went over to the Court. J. sat in some seats reserved for families of pleading lawyers and members of the Court, but the rest of us all sat in the public seats.The children arrived shortly after we did. Uncle Wes got there about four o'clock, and a few friends who have followed the case for years, such as Ollie Rauh and Rosalind Burling were there.Joe Rauh and John Reid, both of whom can plead before the Supreme Court, came and sat inside the bar back of Ed Rhetts.The Washington lawyer was in N.Y., thinking the case would not come up that day, but it really didn't matter as Ed was the only one to talk. (The Washington lawyer was in court on Wednesday.)

Now I will tell you a little about the court procedure which I didn't know before.On the days the court sits they are there from 12 to 4:30 with a half hour from 2 to 2:30 to have lunch.This makes four hours of listening to cases--a really tough grind.Our case was allotted two hours, one hour for Ed, and one hour for Mr. McGuinness, the Gov. lawyer.And one hour means one hour--not 59 minutes or 61 or 62 minutes.Also the cases follow one another immediately without any break. When we got into the Court room I immediately noticed that Mr. Warren's chair was empty and I was quite unhappy as we didn't want an eight man court.But then I listened to the case going on and soon found out it was a California railroad case, and I believe

[434b]

that Mr. Warren had still been Governor of California when this case started thru the courts and so had disqualified himself.He entered the Court at 3:25 and took his seat.The California case ended at 3:27, and Jack's case, No. 407, John S. Service Vs. John Foster Dulles, began at 3:28.(Jack is suing the Sec. of State, who right now is J. F. D.)

Before I tell you about the case I want to say something about the court.The room is not much larger than the Court of Appeals where we were last year, Mother, and the acoustics are 100 percent better.The lawyers had a microphone to talk into and I could hear almost everything the Justices said.Facing the Justices, on their dais, and reading from left to right, they sat in this order.

Brennan, Clark, Douglas, Black, Warren, Frankfurter, Burton, Harlan, Whitaker

Black, Frankfurter, and Burton, are little men, and I couldn't see more than their heads above thelong table or rostrum behind which the Justices sat.Warren, Douglas and Harlan, and Clark are all big men and they seemed to tower over the others.Brennan and Whitaker are medium sized. The backs of the Justice's chairs are all different heights depending on what each man wants and finds the most comfortable.And I believe each Justice takes his chair with him when he retires from the Court.

Soon after Ed began his argument Justice Frankfurter began to interrupt with various questions, and during both arguments Frankfurter asked most of the questions and brought out most of the points that he wanted clarified and amplified.On neither day did Justice Barton or Justice Clark open his mouth.Justice Brennan asked more questions than anyone else except Frankfurter.As far as I can remember Justice Whitaker didn't ask Ed anything but he did ask McGuinness some questions. Justice Douglas asked a few questions of both men.Chief Justice Warren asked Ed almost nothing, but did ask McGuinness quite a few questions; and on Wed. both Justices Black and Harlan put some very tough questions to McGuinness.In fact I think that Justice Black asked the most searching and cogent questions of all, altho Frankfurter certainly did most of the talking and most of the spade work. I must say that they gave Ed a far easier time of it than McGuinness.Olie Rauh, who was sitting next to me, said that in her opinion we had a friendly court.She should know something about it as Joe has often argued cases before the Supreme Court, one just last month in which I understand they gave him a very rugged time.I felt too that the Court was "friendly" and was trying to get at some facts.You can't imagine the difference between these men and the ones on the Court of Appeals. These Justices were trying to find out things, and the three men on the court of appeals last year, just sat there like stone images most of the time.At 4:28 a red light came on (I couldn't see it) and Ed was thru. The Justices all arose as one man and walked out.And that was that for the day.I felt and still feel that things went very well.

Since Connie had offered her house as a place to talk the few of us who were at the court including Ruth and Ed Rhetts and Ruth's brother, Lisa, Helen, Gin and Bob, and one or two others, went to Connie's house for about an hour.I think we all felt as tho we had been running a hard race and that at last we could relax.Oh, yes, Delia was there too as she had gone to Washington to see the doctor Faith works for about her (Delia's) feet. About six o'clock we all went back to Helen and Dick's and later Diana, Ginny and Bob and Faith came out there for drinks. The Tenneys and Greens and Reeds dropped in too, and later those of us who felt like it went out for a Chinese meal at the good Peking restaurant in Washington.This paragraph is quite mixed up.We asked Uncle Wes to come to Connie's after the court but he felt he should run along as he had to pick up Tante Ettie somewhere, and also he has a very hard time hearing and talking with strangers.It was very kind of him to make the effort to come to Court at all.

[434c]

On Wed. he had to go to the funeral ofMrs. Richard Parks and then on to a luncheon so Tues. was the only chance to catch a glimpse of him.

Wed. morningI got up quite early and phoned the McCurdys in time to catch Wayne before going to work.Had a good talk with both him and Frankie but there was no time to try to see each other as we planned to leave Washington right after the court in the afternoon.I think that the next time Jack goes on one of his long trips I'll go to Washington for about a week, taking Philip with me, and then I'll have time to see people.Also next winter, I'll see if I can get Dennis up here some weekend to visit Philip.

We knew that the case would continue as soon as the Court opened on Wed. so we were right in our seats before noon.Dick was there (he had come the afternoon before when he could get away from the War College) and also Marshall Green and another State Dept. friend who came during their lunch hour. The Court opened on the stroke of 12.About 7 minutes were consumed swearing in new lawyers who are now privileged to plead cases before the Supreme Court.They must be lawyers in good standing and they must be introduced by a lawyer who already has the right to plead before the court. Mr. McGuinness started his argument at 12:07. He had hardly got going before Justice Frankfurter jumped into the fray, and from then on, till 1:07 it was mostly Justice Frankfurter arguing with and questioning Mr. McGuinness.I could not help but feel a little sorry for him because he had no choice but to argue this case for the Gov. and the Justices were not easy on him.They kept coming back and coming back to the affidavit given the Gov. by Mr. Acheson (when the Gov. thought the Loyalty Review decision was legal--before the Peter's case argued before this same court) stating that Jack was being fired solely because of the decision of the Loyalty Review Board, a decision which is now illegal.Justice Frankfurter and Justice Black wanted to know how the GOV. could now say that Jack was not fired for these reasons when Mr. Acheson said it was solely the reason.Of course I think that is the nub of the case, whether or not we win it.The Gov. now contends that none of this matters, that Jack could have been fired as a public relations measure! (McGuinness was just about forced to say something of this sort because of the facts of the case) or he could have been fired for any reason, or he could have been fired because of the Loyalty Review Board decision even tho the decision didn't agreewith or believe a word of it. And even tho it was all illegal, it should still be upheld by the court. Well, I do not believe that most of the Justices think this way.Again, I do not know the legal intricacies of the law so no one can foretell the outcome; but I do feel hopeful and encouraged.Gin and Bob and Diana all came to court together the second day.They were all intensely interested in the argument.I think that all of us who heard both days think that the chances of winning this case are good.In fact I will enclose in this letter a little sealed envelope with my guess on how the case will come out, how the justices will vote. Mother, will you open it on the day of the decision and see how near right or wrong I am. Please keep carefully put away until then.

After the case was over, we talked outside for a few minutes and then our family went off with Helen and Dick to have lunch with them at the War College. Diana couldn't come as she was due at the Post. The War College was beautiful with flowering cherries and forsythia. After a hasty lunch we said goodbye to Dick, rushed out to the house and picked up Philip and our bags and all five of us started off for New York. We came across the new Chesapeake Bay Bridge at Annapolis and had a lovely drive across the Eastern Shore of Maryland.Home about 10:30. All dead, but all feeling fine. All of us slept this morning except Jack who went to the office to do something there. Except for last Monday he hasn't been in the office for a month and we still live by steam traps and will probably continue to regardless of the outcome of the case.When I woke up this morning it was snowing and it has been coming down all day in great wet flakes.Looks like January. What a contrast to the warm sun-shiny day in Washington yesterday.The only bit of sight-seeing we did there was to drive around the tidal basin to

[435]

J. SERVICE:obviously intently following the argument and breaking in, as I said before, asking questions, interrogating, trying to press points that they were interested in following.

By this time the whole thing had been narrowed down, resolved to one particular issue; if a government department has regulations, is it required to follow its own regulations?

It was obviously a very intent intellectual exercise, with all these people very much awake, none of them sitting back and just listening.It was a very stimulating procedure.

LEVENSON:In contradistinction perhaps to some of the Senate subcommittee hearings?

J. SERVICE:Oh, yes.Oh, yes.That's true.

LEVENSON: How would you compare it, just to skip chronologically, to the hearings before the Fulbright committee, in 1970, where again there seems considerable acuity, though the organization is rather loose.

J. SERVICE:Yes, it's much looser and everyone sort of takes off in his own direction a little bit. The thing that's so surprising about a Senate committee is how few people show up.There were something like seventeen or twenty members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and we had five or six there, but not all at the same time.One senator would drift in and ask some questions, and maybe he hadn't heard what went on before.It was very easy going and disorganized.At the Supreme Court, of course, everyone was there and everyone was obviously paying attention.

Back now to the waiting for the decision.We kept expecting it from week to week.Monday is the decision day.Each Monday would come, and we didn't get it.

It finally came on June 17 [1957].I had a statement prepared, which was fortunate.You want to turn that off a minute?

LEVENSON:Sure.Did you have two statements prepared just in case?

J. SERVICE:Just one. [laughter]

Anyway, this was a new day, the day of TV.Almost as soon as the Supreme Court decision was announced, TV people descended on us, both in my office and then later on out at our apartment. Fortunately, as I say, we had a statement ready.

[435a]

STATEMENT OF JOHN S. SERVICE

I am thankful for the Court's decision and for our judicial system which gives each American the means to protect his rights and reputation.

For almost nineteen years I was proud to make my career in the American Foreign Service.Every chief under whom I worked and every competent and authorized review of the facts found my service useful and loyal.

In December, 1951, the world was informed that I had been summarily dismissed for "doubt of loyalty".Administrative appeal was refused, and legal action became my only recourse.Through it, the unfounded action of the Loyalty Review Board was declared illegal and expunged. The Government eventually conceded that my discharge was not based upon doubt of my loyalty or security and that its sole basis had been the illegal action of the Loyalty Review Board.Now the
discharge has been declared illegal and the slate is cleaned.

My debt is great:to my attorney, Mr. Charles Edward Rhetts, who accepted the case of a stranger more than seven years ago and, without regard for his own interests, has since devoted his great ability to clearing my name; to the several attorneys who in association with him have contributed to this outcome; to a courageous employer who was willing to give a job to a man publicly defamed; and to hundreds of friends whose unshaken confidence supported my family and me in this long fight for vindication.

[436]

J. SERVICE:Everything went pretty well.The State Department reacted as we had more or less expected or hoped.I was called down to Washington in a few days.They talked about the formalities of coming back in.I had to fill out various forms, security forms and so on, organizations I belonged to and all the rest of it.

The first thing we had to do, though, was to get an order prepared by the district court.In other words, the Supreme Court simply reversed the original finding in the district court, remanded the case to the district court, which had to now write a new order in compliance with the Supreme Court's findings.

That finally came out on July 3 [1957].

Preliminary Contact with the State Department on Procedures for Reinstatement:Another Loyalty Clearance Required

LEVENSON:After the hearing before the Supreme Court you knew that a decision would come by the end of the term.What did you do while you were waiting?

J. SERVICE:We were concerned, of course, with what to do when word came out, particularly if we won, as we hoped and rather expected.I decided to get in touch with the State Department, because we didn't want to be in the position of working out my reinstatement in the press.We wanted to have some sort of an understanding with the State Department beforehand if we could.

LEVENSON:How did Mr. [Joseph C.] Satterthwaite--I guess he was then Director General of the Foreign Service--respond?

J. SERVICE:He asked me as I recall, it must have been telephone, because I can't find any correspondence--asked me to come up to Washington.I saw him and another officer.The point was that they wanted me to understand that even though I won in the Supreme Court and my reinstatement was ordered, it would still not relieve me from the requirements of going through the security clearance process.

LEVENSON: Again?

[437]

J. SERVICE: Oh, yes, because the Court, of course, would not decide that.The Court would decide whether the firing had been improper, procedurally improper.And [the State Department position was] that I would have to go through clearance again.I said I understood that and took it for granted, but that I was nonetheless anxious to persist.So that was the main content of my contact with the State Department before the actual decision came out.

LEVENSON:Was this formal, friendly, or--?

J. SERVICE:Oh, very friendly.Satterthwaite, oddly enough--this is the small world department-- had come from the same little town in Michigan where my father's father had lived as a young man. He knew a lot of my family relatives in this little town of Morenci, Michigan.I had known Satterthwaite casually in the service.

I think these people were a little dumbstruck.The State Department was, I think, nervous and worried.They would have preferred that I just go away.But personally they were friendly. The State Department, certainly the career service--has basically always been sympathetic and friendly in my case.

Going back to the Supreme Court [chuckling], can I just add one little note that I was going to put in?After I'd retired and was in Berkeley, Warren was here on the campus for some reason.

LEVENSON:The opening of the Earl Warren Legal Institute?

J. SERVICE:Yes.There was a function at the Faculty Club, and I forget now just how I happened to be invited.But anyway, I was.So I introduced myself to him, and we had a very pleasant, friendly chat which confirmed my impression of the warmth and genuine decency of the person, the humanity of the man.

I'm not sure that he actually remembered the case.He said he did, but --

LEVENSON:Oh, I would think so.

J. SERVICE:--I don't know whether he really did or not.He obviously didn't want me to press him on the details.[laughter]But, we had a very friendly meeting.

Justice [William 0.] Douglas had been in India and met Caroline.Later on when the Foreign Service Association gave me my luncheon in '73, I think it was, he was invited.It wasn't my suggestion.He was invited, but he wrote a very nice letter saying that his health prevented it.So, he didn't come to the luncheon.

[438]

Leave from State Department to Wind Up Sarco Company Business

J. SERVICE:I asked for leave from the State Department to clear up my affairs with Sarco.Wells was very [chuckles], I think, well, unhappy in a way.He was pleased, but he was unhappy about my leaving.

But I had told him right at our very first meeting, when we had our first interview about a job, that I was fighting my case in the courts and would expect to go back if I was successful.So he'd always known this.But like everyone else, he thought that the chances of winning were practically zero. No one really thought we were going to win.

Without a ready candidate to put in my place, Wells decided to sell the export company, Sarco International, to his English company, Spirax.This was a very good company which had developed quite independently, with some excellent people running it. It was based in Cheltenham.

The two top Spirax people came over to Zurich. I went to Zurich and we worked out all the details of the sale.Then I had to go back to London with them because they had to get the Bank of England to approve the foreign exchange.It was 100,000 pounds sterling, and Mr. Wells wanted it in U.S. dollars.

I went and sat in on the talks.I was very pleased at one point because the Treasury representative-- they had been talking a good deal about the value of the export company and how it had been developed and so on--the Treasury representative pointed out that they had not included any undertaking and commitment by me not to enter the steam trap business. [laughter]I quite gladly gave them a commitment not to go back into the steam trap business as competition!

It was approved and went through, again to the annoyance of the people in New York, because they felt that this was a slap at them, as it was.They hadn't been given a chance to at least offer or to bid on the company.

LEVENSON:Wells was how old by then?

J. SERVICE:Wells was in his eighties.I don't think we ever really knew.It was always sort of a mystery, just how old Wells was.

[439]

Salary Level

J. SERVICE:Going back to arrangements with the State Department, they had to consult with the Department of Justice on various matters such as the level at which I would be reinstated, what to do about back pay.All the questions of back pay had to go to the court of claims.But, as a preliminary to the argument in the court of claims, the Department of Justice required the State Department to reinstate me at the closest equivalent to the salary at which I had been discharged. Of course, in the meantime, there had been salary increases.But also, in the State Department there are automatic yearly steps if your performance is satisfactory.

When I was fired I had been in class II at step IV.With this jiggery-pokery at the Department of Justice, the State Department was forced to reinstate me at a lower step, at step II. So, actually my status was lower. * [phone interruption]

Actually, of course, I should have been reinstated at the top of class II at step VI, assuming that the automatic increases would have been received, which was common unless you have an unsatisfactory performance, and of course disregarding the fact that I'd been selected for class I in 1951, but there was no way to get it.

We had to wait till it had been settled in the court of claims, which then took us another six years. But, let's discuss that later.

The Department was worried about my investments in Sarco.We had to convince them that there wasn't any conflict of interest in my owning some stock in Sarco.

LEVENSON:What was the difference between that and say, somebody who'd inherited a block of real estate?

J. SERVICE:They were worried that I was involved in a company that did export business, and so on.It was all rather farfetched.

At any rate, I came back to the State Department at the beginning of September, I think it was, 1957.

[440]

Service vs. Dulles as Precedent

LEVENSON:Before we start that I would like to get on the record the importance of the settlement of the case, Service vs. Dulles 1957, to the other people caught up in the McCarthy era. As I recall, for the other China Hands who had subsequently been fired it had no impact on their cases because department regulations had changed.Is that correct?

J. SERVICE:That's right.They had changed the regulations so as to remove any basis for legal redress.They made it impossible for people to appeal to the courts.

LEVENSON:Do you interpret that as a view that there was, at least in some circles, a feeling that your case was bound to succeed, going back now to '52, '53?

J. SERVICE:I don't think that they expected it to succeed, but they simply wanted to remove the possibility of people bringing suits.They wouldn't have any more argument about it, just get rid of people summarily.

My case has had application in many other cases.After the firing of [Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald] Cox, the court in Washington decided that Cox's firing had been improper because the regulations of the Department had not been followed.It was decided by Judge Gesell, invoking precisely the principle on which we'd won.But, Cox was not interested in being reinstated.So he didn't pursue the matter.I'm sure that it has had an effect on a good many people.But I don't know of any loyalty security cases that it has been applied to.

LEVENSON:Or other classes of people involved in the McCarthy period?

J. SERVICE:I don't know of any.Of course, other people have been affected by the earlier decision, the Peters case [Peters vs Hobby] which was that the Loyalty Review Board had no authority to assume jurisdiction of a case that had been decided in favor of the employee.Other people did benefit from that, although I don't know of any people that were actually reinstated.

LEVENSON:Thank you.

[441]

XIII UNCLASSIFIED STATE DEPARTMENT DUTIES, 1957-1962

Reorganizes State Department's System of Moving and Storage

J. SERVICE:Before I came back, the Department notified me and the press that I would be doing unclassified work.It was in transportation, handling personal and household effects of people transferred to and from abroad.It was a very expensive matter, and the State Department did not do it in a very efficient, organized way.There were some packing companies in Washington that traditionally had handled the business.But they really did it on what amounted to a cost-plus basis. There was no limitation on what they could charge, and the customer, of course, was pleased if it was done in a super way, so the costs were super also.

The Department wanted me to make a study and make recommendations as to how shipment of household effects and moving people around generally could be handled more efficiently.So that's what I started to do.A great deal of emphasis was put on the fact I was doing unclassified, non-substantive work.

Apparently the Schulzes [Caroline's parents] were worried about this, because I see I have a letter here that I wrote them discussing why I needed, for the time being, to accept this type of work.I don't know whether we want to put that in or not.You might look at it.

LEVENSON:Quite a comedown from having been president of a company--

J. SERVICE:Oh, well--I obviously had to expect something like this.I was much too much of a hot potato to be given any substantive work, policy work, and besides I didn't have any security clearance at this time.So this was more or less what I expected.It was not a challenging job, but it was a chance to do something.

I did a lot of study.We got a lot of data together on shipments.I talked to a lot of other people in the business, talked to other government departments, how they handled their shipments, the Pentagon and other agencies that moved people around.

[442]

J. SERVICE:We finally came up with recommendations.These included merging various functions into one unit.They were scattered.Writing orders was done one place.We had what we called dispatch agents or forwarding agents in various ports and they were handled by another agency and so on.We brought these functions all together in a new division which was called Transportation Management, TM, which of course [laughter] has now acquired a quite different meaning [Transcendental Meditation] .

I drafted the necessary papers, putting through the bureaucratic process of getting it organized, the job classifications for the personnel, and so on.Then I became first head of Transportation Management.

We got letters, which are in the file, commending the amount of money that was being saved.We did, I think, a job that I don't have any apologies for.It meant, however, some fairly drastic changes in the way people s effects were handled, which caused a lot of people to be unhappy.

We had explored all sorts of ideas.At that time jets were just starting to come in.There was a real problem of using the old propeller planes.Somebody came up with the proposal that we could charter these old DC-6's, or whatever they were, and run a sort of a special Foreign Service, once-a-week flight to Paris or Frankfurt, something like that.Fantastic savings, but the idea of losing one plane full of 150 Foreign Service people was too much.We didn't go ahead with it.

It wasn't bad.There were some annoyances in it.I noticed that Jack Kahn's got one of them.The CIA would not have anything to do with me because of the fact that I didn't have security clearance. Of course, a lot of CIA people went abroad under Foreign Service cover.So when they had some need to consult with us, they would get in touch with my assistant and come over and talk to him.I'd let him use my office and my desk and they'd have their conversation. Afterward he'd discuss with me what it was all about, what we should do.

I knew from the trucking companies that trucked all of our effects shipments to the port of embarkation, that they always knew when it was a CIA shipment.The CIA were not bound by State regulations on the amount of cigarettes and booze.[chuckle]So, they always recognized CIA shipments, no problem at all.

LEVENSON:This was just shipping household goods, was it?

J. SERVICE:Yes.

[443]

LEVENSON:And they wouldn't deal with you?

J. SERVICE:No.We also shipped office supplies and things like that through all these dispatch agents we had.

Some Hostile Press Reactions to Jack's Reinstatement

J. SERVICE:I was hassled a bit by the press.My coming back was a sort of one-day wonder. Some of it was quite unfriendly.Time magazine, for instance, had taken the attitude right at the Supreme Court decision that, "Well, now the Supreme Court has told the State Department the right way to do it.Let's get on with it.Do it the right way this time."

They dug up a lot of the McCarthy period stories about my views on China.I told the man that his research was very bad, that obviously if that was representative of my views, I had deserved to be fired.Then they just dug up more stories.[chuckling]

But they were still basically unfriendly at this time.A lot of the press was.Marguerite Higgins wrote for the Herald-Tribune.She wanted to argue with me about American mistakes in coalition government and so on in Europe and Poland and so on.I told her I couldn't talk anything about Europe; I only knew about China.She didn't know anything about China, so we broke off our talk.

LEVENSON:Did you ever make any attempt to break into the press at this point?

J. SERVICE:No.You mean to get a good press?

LEVENSON:Yes, or to respond to correct the record.

J. SERVICE:No.I had some discussion over the phone with a Time man who wanted to write a story.This Marguerite Higgins I had an unpleasant time with.But, the rest of the people I didn't argue with.Most of it was friendly.It's fairly neutral, you see by the clippings.

Eric Sevareid used a broadcast to note my return--he'd had a broadcast about my discharge--and took me to lunch.I remember, very nicely, at which he said he was concerned about his own future and didn't think that his larynx, or his appeal, would last for many more years.I forget-- He thought he had five or six more.

[444]

J. SERVICE:years as a maximum.Of course, that was 1957.He's still there, but he's retiring at the end of this month, I think.

Odd Angles in the State Department

J. SERVICE:There were some odd angles to my coming back.The State Department was touchy and nervous about my being there.Somebody dreamed up an idea of having experienced officers in the Department become "older brothers" to new officers just being commissioned.I received a notice and replied, of course, I'd be glad to do it, to have some younger buddy assigned to me.They quickly sent me a notice saying that the response had been so overwhelming that they didn't need any more. [laughter]

Soon after my reinstatement there was a new issue of the Foreign Service List.This did not specifically mention my discharge (which the court had ruled was to be "expunged from the record"), but it gave details of my employment by Sarco and Sarco International.The Supreme Court order was that I was to have all the advantages of continuous, unbroken service.Looking back now, it seems a trivial matter.But I insisted, and the Department agreed, that future issues of the Foreign Service List would have no reference to the break in my career.

Oberlin at that time had a program of inviting alumni to come back to talk about different career possibilities, I had done this several times many years earlier when I was stationed in Washington, going out and talking about the Foreign Service to anybody that was interested.

Now they invited me again.I suppose all the publicity reminded them of my presence.But the personnel people voted this down and sent some guy out who had never been in the Foreign Service himself, just some personnel type.They apparently were worried about possible publicity on my discussing careers in the Foreign Service.

LEVENSON: You had to clear a thing like that with the Department?

J. SERVICE:Well, I did.

LEVENSON:Would you have done that before your firing, before the McCarthy period?

J. SERVICE:I suppose not, probably.But, at this point, I thought, it's better to clear things.After all, I departed from the paths of being a good bureaucrat earlier and I was back on the path now.

There seemed to be general agreement that I could not be kept indefinitely on unclassified work, such as transportation management.The job was below my rank and seniority, for one thing.

[445]

J. SERVICE:And there were regulations limiting the length of time a Foreign Service officer could spend in the Department without an assignment abroad.

I think the Department simply didn't want to grasp the nettle, didn't want to have to deal with the question.It may have been that they were hoping for me to retire.The letter I wrote to Satterthwaite, you remember, mentioned the possibility of my retiring early.

But I hadn't yet reached the minimum retirement age.I had to be fifty. In any case, I very much wanted to clarify my status and "prove something" by getting security clearance.Some of my friends in the Department felt that the only way to force the issue was to get a foreign assignment. They could hardly send me to a foreign post without a security clearance.

A New Style of Security Hearing

J. SERVICE:In November of'58, the Department finally had new security hearings which, as I think I've already indicated, were very different from the old ones.They no longer had a Loyalty Security Board, or at least I didn't reach that stage because I was simply interviewed by some members of SY (the Office of Security).

No formal charges were presented, which meant that I couldn't have a lawyer.I also had no right to a transcript.I was simply there by myself to answer questions.I couldn't prepare or present any defense or call any witnesses, because the formula was that I was just called in to answer a few questions.

It went on for about ten days.

LEVENSON:Ten days?

J. SERVICE:Not all day every day, but sessions for several hours a day for about ten days.I dug this out of a letter which I wrote about that time, so that jogs my memory.

We hashed over all the old business.Obviously they didn't put credence in the stories about Val [Chao]'s being a Communist spy or anything like that.It was a very unpleasant hearing in a way.The chief prosecutor, the person presenting the evidence and leading the questioning was Otto Otepka, who later on was

[446]

J. SERVICE:fired by State because he had been leaking material from the files to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Sourwine.But we'll come to that later on.

There was one Foreign Service man on the panel who seemed to be on my side and probably was the swing vote.The vote was two to one for clearance.Obviously the one against me was Otepka.

Last State Department Assignment:Consul to Liverpool

J. SERVICE: At this time the Department planned to send me as administrative officer to Bonn.I was told by [Loy] Henderson himself that the army objected to my assignment.Just why the army should object or why the army should have the right to veto administrative personnel in the embassy, I don't know.Anyway, that was the story.

But Ed Rice was in personnel in the Department at the time.And he has recently told me that it was the West German government which objected to the assignment.It was not due to any objection to me personally.But the Cohn & Schine circus had played most of their Foreign Service havoc and gotten much of their bad publicity in American offices in Germany.Then several American senior officers serving in Germany had been McCarthy targets (Charlie Thayer, Miles Reber, et al).And finally and most recently, the West German government had had the unhappy experience of all the publicity relating to the John Davies firing--he was counselor in the embassy at Bonn.The West Germans were afraid that there would be more controversy involving me.They have the right to decline to accept diplomatic assignments, so said no on me.

All this makes a bit of a mystery about Loy Henderson's excuses.A cover story?Or did the U.S. Army also object?

So I was then assigned as consul to Liverpool.By this time I had already spent sixteen weeks very assiduously studying German.Anyway, while I was at the Foreign Service Institute I insisted on taking an examination in Chinese.There was a big hullabaloo at this time in the Department about language abilities and qualifications.There had been a lot of stuff in the press about people being sent to posts when they didn't have any knowledge of the language.

I announced, to the surprise of the people at the Institute, I wanted an oral language examination in Chinese.The exam was by a very pleasant Chinese who was one of the instructors. There

[447]

J. SERVICE: was also an observer.I forget his name, but he was an American who had some training in Chinese.I suppose he was a faculty member at the Institute.

The Chinese and I got into talking about [chuckles] various things--about de Gaulle and the atomic bomb--atomic testing was an issue at that time--and then about my next assignment.The Chinese just made up a phonetic approximation for Liverpool.I understood him all right, but the man that was observing said afterward, well, he thought we did very well, but he lost us at one point.I got a decent grade.

LEVENSON: Had you had any opportunity to keep up your spoken Chinese?

J. SERVICE:No, none at all.

LEVENSON: What about your reading knowledge?Had you used Chinese material?

J. SERVICE:No.I had been completely away.I could still speak some Chinese.I got a 3+, which I think was a tough grade.I think I really deserved a 4, on a grading scale of 5.But, they gave me a 3+, which makes me "reasonably fluent" or something like that.

I'd had no contact with China.

We had collected all of our effects by this time. They'd been stored for years in attics of various people in Washington.We had lots and lots of books including a lot of books on China.We simply lined them up on the big front porch, lined all the books up on edge and let any friends come and help themselves.Passersby on the street would come up and say, "What's this?"Then we'd say, "Help yourself."We gave away nothing really valuable but a lot of books.Of course, I never thought I'd have any more connection with China at all at any time.

LEVENSON: How sad.

J. SERVICE:Then the house was rented after we left.The next tenant was a Norwegian officer. There were some bookcases in the house.They said, "Well, we have no books.Would you mind if we take the books just to have something on the shelves?" [chuckling]So, the leftovers were left for the Norwegians to put on their shelves.

Liverpool was a pleasant post.It had the advantage of a very nice house.We liked the idea of going to England.I went over early with Philip to get him into school because the English school year started rather early.Then Caroline came by ship.

[448]

J. SERVICE:The English school was very concerned about whether they would admit Philip. They wanted an nterview.The main purpose of the interview apparently was that the headmaster wanted to be sure that I, being an ignorant American, understood that discipline in English schools included physical discipline.I said we understood that.

LEVENSON:Meaning canings?

J. SERVICE:Canings.Philip was never caned, but we agreed in advance that it was a condition of his being admitted.[laughter]It was a good school.

The Liverpool Consulate:A Visa-Issuing Office

LEVENSON:What were your duties as U.S. consul in Liverpool?

J. SERVICE:Liverpool, basically, was a visa-issuing office for the north of England.London issued all the immigration visas for southern England, we issued them for northern England, and Glasgow issued them for Scotland.

The English quota is very large.It was always easy to get an immigration visa.So if anyone was coming to the States with the idea of staying for any length of time or might want to work, we usually issued an immigration rather than a tourist visa.It took away any impediments to working while they were here.

We issued a lot of immigration visas, which is a fairly complicated procedure, and also a great many temporary visitor visas.There were a number of Americans in the area.There had been an American bomber base in Burtonwood, not far away between Liverpool and Manchester.It had been a large base, but was practically closed down now. It was on stand-by basis, stores and warehouses, a supply base.

That had meant in the past there were a large number of Americans who needed passports.But this was practically all phased out when we were there, so that it was not a very exciting office. Political reporting and trade work were handled out of London.

We were occasionally asked to do something.At that time they were trying to blacklist firms that did business with Cuba.We did some foolishness about trying to report on companies that
were trading with Cuba.

[449]

J. SERVICE:It was a job mainly of running a visa-mill office and representing the United States. There had always been an American consul-general before I was there.Local people invariably called me consul-general simply because they couldn't conceive of anyone except a consul-general occupying the post.

I was senior to most of or many of the people that had been there.My rank entitled me to the title of consul-general, but it would have required Senate confirmation which the State Department was not about to try to hassle with.

I got invited out to a lot of formal dinners.The Royal Society of Chartered Surveyors, The Royal Society of Auditors and Accountants, and so on, ad infinitum.All these organizations had their annual dinner, white tie.Some honored guests give toasts to the city and port of Liverpool, or this or that.Consuls were fair game for this sort of thing. I did a fair amount of that.

LEVENSON:Did you enjoy it?

J. SERVICE:No, I did not enjoy it very much, [laughter] I don't like giving speeches, but I had to do it.

There was a very active English Speaking Union.They were a lot of fun.We had a good deal of contact with them, turned over our house once a year for a big party.

Ginny came over and got married in Liverpool.We had a very small wedding for her.This was fairly early when we didn't know many people, but our inclinations anyway were to make it fairly small.

There was a large consular corps, about forty or forty-two consuls, but not all career consuls.A lot of them were honorary consuls, British businessmen or lawyers, insurance people, something like that, who for business or social reasons liked the position.There would be an honorary consul for the Dominican Republic or some country like that.

My predecessor had taken a very rigid view and refused to call on any of these people.I called on them all, which of course made staunch friends.

LEVENSON: Was there awareness, in the press or in your personal dealings, that you had been a very controversial figure in America?

J. SERVICE:Yes, some.I'm not sure in the general public, but the people in the English Speaking Union knew about it due to the fact they were told about it at a very early meeting.

[450]

J. SERVICE: I eventually became president of the consular corps and joined several clubs.It was a very clubby town.Some of the people in the London embassy were a little bit inclined to view club memberships as a barometer of success in the local community.At any rate, I joined more clubs than made sense, usually as an honorary member.You paid monthly dues but no initiation.

Anti-American Feelings

LEVENSON:What was the level of anti-American feeling?

J. SERVICE:There was a great deal of criticism, anti-American feeling, since we had started up nuclear testing in the atmosphere at that time.Ban-the-bomb marches and parades were the order of the day.A delegation came and called on me and had a sort of sit-down in the office.

The police were very cooperative and friendly.The Ban-the-bomb people always gave advance warnings.They didn't pop in on you. They wanted to have the press notified, for one thing. So we knew they were coming and the press and the police were there in the next office.

I asked them to leave, and they said they would not leave until I promised them that the petition that they handed me was going to be given personally to Kennedy.I said, "Well, you know I can't make that promise.All I can do is to send it to the embassy in London which I'm sure will send it on to Washington.But there's no way for me to make a promise that this will go into the hands of President Kennedy."

So, they said, "Well, we'll have to stay here until you give the promise."They'd all been smoking my cigarettes and having some tea.It had all been quite friendly.Then the police came in and formally, one-two-three, asked them to leave and when they refused they hauled them out.

Acting Supervisory Consul-General for the British Isles

J. SERVICE:At that time we had about eight posts, I guess, in the British Isles.There had been more.Now, they've been cut way, way down.Even Liverpool has been closed now.There was an officer in the London embassy serving as supervisory consul-general to

[451]

J. SERVICE:keep in touch with these offices and make sure that they were handling their work properly.He was also in charge of the consular work in the embassy in London.

The man in that job was Don Smith who had been chief of personnel when I was in personnel in '49.He was due for home leave, and he recommended and it was approved that I go down to London to sit in his chair and hold the job while he was away, for about ten weeks I think it was.

That was very pleasant.I went down for a while and then Caroline came down.We lived in a little bed-and-breakfast hotel on Gloucester Place, not far from Grosvenor Square.My assignment was somewhat irregular since I wasn't the senior consular officer; but a lot of the people who were in charge of the offices in Great Britain had been brought into the Department under the Wristonization program which had recently consolidated the State Department civil service and the Foreign Service.

LEVENSON:Did you have any problems with the embassy people?

J. SERVICE:None at all.The first ambassador was John Hay Whitney, and he had made a visit to Liverpool for a speaking engagement very soon after we got there.

Later on it was David Bruce, and he also visited Liverpool.My relations with both the ambassadors were very good.

Whitney came there fairly soon after I came to Liverpool.There was a large reception given for him by the English Speaking Union.I had to introduce him.You know, when you take over a new post it's a race to learn everybody, get to know everybody as quickly as possible, sort of selling yourself in a new community.He was quite impressed, I think, by the fact that I knew as many people as I did within a few weeks.

Dismal Career Prospects

J. SERVICE:Actually, I felt I was doing a good job.I was getting commended.We had an inspection in Liverpool with very favorable comments.

LEVENSON:How big a staff did you have?

J. SERVICE:We had four Americans outside myself, about twenty-two or so local staff.

[452]

J. SERVICE: I heard various reports, rumors, that I'd been recommended for promotion by the selection boards, which were meeting each year.I began to wonder what really was the score.I wrote in each year.You could write to the Department and say, "How did I stand?"They would give you a general reply.

It was always the top half but not quite in the promotion zone. This got to be a frustration, and I think contributed to a period of depression I had in Liverpool.The doctor told me I better take up a hobby.

I went back to postage stamp collecting which I had given up when I was about eleven or twelve in boarding school in Shanghai.I still had my old collection, so I resuscitated that and started buying stamps at auctions and from dealers, joining a stamp society in Liverpool. It was a good idea.There were some very good auctions in London, still are.It's a very good center for stamps.I only collect Chinese stamps.

LEVENSON:Do you still keep it up?

J. SERVICE: Well, I'm not active.I just don't have the time for it.After I came back to the States and got involved in being a graduate student I sort of tapered off.I've got a collection.I still go to stamp society meetings.The China Stamp Society has a chapter here in the [San Francisco] Bay Area.We meet once a month. But it doesn't quite have the fascination for me now that it did in Liverpool days.

Meanwhile, I had come on home leave in October of '61.I'd been two years in Liverpool, and so I came home in October and tried to find out where I stood.The Kennedy administration had been in now since the beginning of '61.

LEVENSON:As I recall, there were serious efforts made at that point to influence a change in American China policy?

J. SERVICE:There were some, but they proved abortive.[Dean] Rusk apparently was very much against it.The man running F[ar] E[ast]--Roger Hilsman--tried to do something about it, and so did James C. Thomson who then was on the National Security Council staff.Anyway, that proved abortive.

Rusk had talked, when he came in as secretary of state, about rectifying wrongs.There had been high hopes that Kennedy himself would be more active, more willing to do something about victims of the McCarthy period.

[453]

J. SERVICE:Anyway, I came back to Washington on home leave and talked to personnel.I had an interview with the man who had what was the equivalent of my old job, "The Wailing Wall." Now it was called Career Management and had become a regular section, with several people.

I found out that a summary had been written for the record saying that because of all I had gone through, it could be assumed or expected that I would be unwilling to take responsibilities and make decisions.Obviously, this had been put in to really prevent, to forestall, any board that wanted to promote me.

LEVENSON:Do you have any intuitions or ideas as to who did that?

J. SERVICE:No.I have to assume that it was done with the knowledge or at the instigation or direction of Loy Henderson.

I thought it was a bit unfair, because as soon as I got to Liverpool, I had to make a decision on a very ticklish visa case.One of the younger leaders of the Labour Party wanted a visa to the United States, and our visa officer turned him down on the basis that he was left wing and perhaps a Communist.I forget the man's name but it's been in the news quite a bit.I had to explain to the visa officer that there were some very serious differences of opinion between the Labour Party and the Communists.I instructed him to issue the visa.

It seemed to me that I hadn't shown myself as being unwilling or unable to take responsibilities in the running of the Liverpool office.There had been some reorganization, and I had had some personnel problems.I'd been selected to go down to London and so on.So the comment that I was unwilling to take responsibility obviously was on instruction.The effect was an instruction to the selection boards not to promote me.

On the other hand, I have to admit that in my own letter to Satterthwaite, I had suggested I was resigned to the idea or accepted the idea of early retirement.

LEVENSON:What went on inside you at that point?Quite evidently by your early career and your subsequent performance you were entitled to expect a chance at the top.

J. SERVICE:I think this was the most anger I ever felt at the Department.

LEVENSON:Did you vent it at all?

J. SERVICE:No.I didn't think there was any point in making an issue of it.This was somebody's subjective analysis or judgment.What was more important, I felt, was trying to find out what the attitude

[454]

J. SERVICE:was on assignment, transfer, and promotion.We had to do that pretty much at the White House level.

Roger Jones was at that time the administrative head of the State Department.I'd had some slight acquaintance through Bun Gladieux.Jones was not a State Department man, or a Foreign Service man, but a career civil service man in Washington who'd held various administrative jobs. He was very sympathetic and was very encouraging.

In fact he did, I think, push through what amounted to the rehabilitation of some people like Tony Freeman, who got an ambassadorship to Colombia and then later on Mexico.Jones kept urging me to hang in there and be patient.

[Interview 13: November 7, 1977]

J. SERVICE:By this time they had had to put in a special regulation.The Foreign Service regulations had specified that you could only stay in class II for ten years.If you were not promoted in that time you were automatically retired."Selected out" was the term.

My promotion to class II had been in 1948, so I was already reaching fourteen years.They had passed a special regulation, which really was just the "Service regulation," since it applied to no case except my own, saying that if you had been suspended or fired, removed from the service and then later reinstated, that the time out would not apply for selection out.This was a sort of an unwelcome embarrassment, shall we say--

LEVENSON: To the Department?

J. SERVICE:No, to me.I had been at the top of my class, and now had to have a special regulation to avoid selection out.I had fallen way behind all the rest of my class members.All the people that came into the service when I did, into class II when I did, had gone way ahead of me.

LEVENSON:Except for the other China Hands, who had been fired or resigned in the McCarthy period.

J. SERVICE:Oh yes, there had been some of them who had been fired and some had retired.But even the ones that had stayed in the service, although their promotions had been held up by Scott McCleod--people like Tony Freeman even those people now had moved ahead.

LEVENSON: Right.

[455]

J. SERVICE:You want to turn that off a minute?

LEVENSON:Sure.[tape off]

J. SERVICE:By the spring of 1962, we could get no good news.Things, I think, were looking more gloomy from the Washington end.

My brother, Dick, had become acquainted with Dean Acheson, the former secretary, the man who had fired me.As I recall, Acheson had volunteered to try to do some exploration of the situation.I don't think I even knew about it at the time, or if I did I said nothing would come of it.

But at any rate, Acheson wrote a letter to Dick dated April 20, in which he says, "After talking once with the Secretary of State," with Dean Rusk, "and twice again with Roger Jones, I agree with your conclusion that 'the retirement should go through.' The secretary was understanding and well-disposed but seemed over-conscious of all the difficulties in the way of promotion."

1 had already made up my mind anyway that it was a fruitless business.I had been told off the record, informally, that the Department was willing for me to stay in Liverpool, but that I could not expect any substantive job, any policy making or responsible job, and that I should not expect a promotion and that they would undertake that I would not be retired or selected out.In other words, they would have to keep changing the regulation so that I was not forced out by being forcibly retired.

This seemed to me an untenable situation.I think Caroline might have been willing to stay on.I could have become a sort of an old man of Liverpool.But, as a post it was far less interesting, far less important than the post I'd held in New Zealand fifteen years before.At any rate, I put in for retirement.

I had come back to the Foreign Service in '57 with a good deal of realism, I think, about my situation and prospects.Then I had fallen away from that sort of stern and sensible attitude. I think I'd been deluded by the fact that I had gotten many, many commendations of one sort or another.I'm not trying to stuff the record here with various things.

I'd done well in the Department.A new administration had come in.So, the result was that I felt frustrated and a sense of failure in going out--

LEVENSON:Was this more acute than your distress in the 50's?

[456]

J. SERVICE:It was a very great disappointment.Yes, very much of a disappointment, I think. This was more of a personal failure, I felt.But again, it was also somewhat like the first one, in that it was something that was really out of my hands, out of the State Department s hands.It was something decided, in an impersonal, distant kind of way by White House policy.

The White House was obviously worried about another long hassle with, the Internal Security Subcommittee.They were already heavily engaged over Otepka, because State had fired Otto Otepka, who had been the big leak from the State Department to the [Internal Security Subcommittee] committee.I think they simply didn't want to complicate that issue by getting embroiled in my case again.

I'd been investigated and investigated and investigated.I didn't particularly fear any more investigations.I was quite resigned to go through with it.But the White House, I think, just didn't want to do it.

At any rate, I decided to retire.There's a rather nice letter here from Dean Rusk, which he might just possibly have written himself.After all he did know me, had known me.

Retirement; May 31, 1962

J. SERVICE:My actual retirement was a bit more sudden than I expected.In the spring of 1962 there was a general across the board increase in Foreign Service salaries.Whenever there's an increase in salaries there's a retirement problem.Our pensions are based on average pay for the last five years.If there's been an increase in pay, then everyone wants to stay five years to get the benefit of the higher base for the retirement.

To counteract that, to keep people from staying in after a general rise, the government offers a plum if you'll retire by a certain date; they give you a share of the benefit.In other words, they add one or two percent on your retirement.This particular plum was expiring May 31. If I was going to take advantage of it, I had to retire by then. I did and so did quite a number of others.

I was in London, and there was no particular celebration.It just happened that we had drinks at the home of an administrative officer.He invited us not for the retirement really but because he had stayed with us in Liverpool and was just repaying hospitalities.

[457]

J. SERVICE:We stayed on in England because Philip's school didn't end until the end of July. Caroline and I went off and traveled on the Continent, took a cruise in the Mediterranean, which she'd always wanted to do.

The government let us stay in the house in Liverpool.There was no successor assigned yet.So, we stayed there and then came home in the summer.

Sale of Sarco Stock

J. SERVICE:I should mention that all this had become a little easier financially because of the fact I had just sold my stock in Sarco Therm Controls. So we did have some funds to draw on, which gave us a little slack for things like a cruise in the Mediterranean.

The people in Sarco Canada eventually became interested in buying the minority stock interest held by me and Cumming. This was done in early '62.Cumming had a long hassle with the majority stockholders.They had tried to buy us out, force us out, induce us to sell at a ridiculously unfair valuation of stock.Then they tried to pull a fast one on us by making a deal with another company to sell the assets of the company.

They planned to sell the assets at an unrealistic, low valuation.Part of their own consideration was that they would get very good contracts to continue to operate the company, with fancy pensions and other benefits.

At any rate, we had to go to court.Wells' lawyers, whom we had gotten to know very well by this time, the Morris Ernst firm--Leo Rosen actually was the man that worked with us--we got an injunction to stop the projected sale.So we were able to preserve our interests.

LEVENSON:I find that very impressive.I've known career businessmen who've been euchred out in similar deals.How come you were able to prevent this?

J. SERVICE:I think that we always had the sympathetic help and interest of Rosen's law firm, who had been Wells' and still were Wells' law firm.Leo Rosen by this time had become a very close friend, and he'd been involved in the hearing with McCarthy, you recall.

[458]

J. SERVICE:So they had a friendly interest in our, or certainly my welfare, and I think the other man's too.The deal the majority stock holders tried to pull was pretty raw.One didn't have to be particularly astute to realize one was being euchred, shall we say, to use a more polite word. [laughter]

C. SERVICE:Come look at our rainbow.

[459]

XIV BERKELEY YEARS, 1962-1977

An M.A. in Political Science

J. SERVICE:I thought we'd probably come back to Berkeley--it seemed the logical place for both of us--and try going back to school, study and get a degree, a Ph.D.I wrote to several people.One of them was Woody [Woodbridge] Bingham here at Berkeley, whom I had known slightly.He was a friend of Edmund and Marian Clubb's, and a professor of Chinese history here at Berkeley.I'd met him in New York at the Clubb's various times, although he and his wife had left Peking just before Caroline and I went there in '35.

I wrote to John Fairbank at Harvard, and also to Mary [Claybaugh] Wright at Yale.I'd met her during the '57- '59 period, I think, when I was in the Department.

The Association for Asian Studies must have had a meeting in Washington.Fairbank, who had always been very good at keeping in touch with me, had invited me to cocktails for a small group at his mother's home in Washington.

LEVENSON:I was there.Do you remember?

J. SERVICE:I remember meeting Joe [Joseph R. Levenson], but Joe never remembered it.Were you there too?

LEVENSON:Yes.

J. SERVICE:At any rate, I had met Mary Wright there, and she made quite an impression on me obviously.So, I wrote a letter to her.I was telling these people that I was thinking of retiring, going back to school, and did they have any suggestions, advice, and so on.

[460]

J. SERVICE:Fairbank said that there were too many historians in the China field already and not enough political scientists and I should study political science.He recommended Berkeley because of [Robert] Scalapino being here, and Joe Levenson in history.He steered me away from history into political science.

Mary Wright was very keen on Berkeley because she had just read a manuscript--as a reader for the Stanford Press--Chalmers Johnson's book, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power.She said it was a very good book and was very much impressed.

Woody Bingham was just perplexed at my whole idea.He was cordial and friendly and said, "Of course we'd be glad to see you at Berkeley."But, why anybody at the age of fifty-two, almost fifty-three, should start the long, arduous road toward a Ph.D.,I think just escaped him.

In my ignorance, I didn't realize that to get into a place like Berkeley one had to apply long in advance.

LEVENSON:I was going to ask about that.

J. SERVICE:I'm sure that back in 1927, when I'd been here before, one simply went down at the beginning of the term and registered.I had been a student, which becomes the point of the story here.

I called on Scalapino who was head of the department [Political Science].He was cordial saying they would like to have me but there was this problem; I hadn't applied back in April when I should have.

I went around to the admissions office and got various forms.Reading the small print on one of them, it said that this required early admissions date did not apply if you had formerly been admitted as a graduate student at the campus, at Berkeley.

I had been admitted in 1932, in the fall of '32.I went back and asked them if they had a record, and sure enough they had a record.Even though I never finished the semester--I had dropped out in order to go to Washington to take the oral exams for the Foreign Service--I was there on the records as having been admitted in 1932.On this I got myself into Berkeley!

LEVENSON: Thirty years later.

J. SERVICE: Exactly thirty years later.

[460a]

(Photo Guide)

1. Philip, Virginia, Bob, and Caroline Service, Washington, D.C., 1957.

2.Joseph R. Levenson, left, with John S. Service, Center for Chinese Studies, University of
California, Berkeley, 1964.

3.John S. Service, Aspen, 1972.

4.John S. Service receiving an honorary degree, Oberlin College, 1977.

5.Jack and Caroline Service with Chou En-lai in Peking, October 27, 1971.

[461]

J. SERVICE:The other problem was that since my undergraduate major had been in economics, and I had had only scattered courses in political science, they couldn't admit me directly to the graduate program.I would have to take some undergraduate courses in political science.

I, overenthusiastically, signed up for five.My adviser was Norman Jacobson.He thought I was doing a bit much, but at any rate, I was determined to try it.I soon found that four courses in political science [chuckling] was enough.I think that first year they were all political science. Later on of course, I took Joe, your husband's, course. They'll know who this is if I say Joe, won't they?[Joseph R. LevensonJ

LEVENSON:I think so.

J. SERVICE:I first took Joe's general course in Chinese history.Then I took a seminar later on which was very interesting and much fun.

LEVENSON: I remember his shock when you turned up in his class.He was always embarrassed that he had not been to China.I can remember very vividly him coming home and saying, "You'll never guess," with a big sigh and a look of alarm, "who I've got in my class."His feeling was not alarm at any of the political things, but the fact that you had been in China and he never had! [laughing]

J. SERVICE:He gave some good lectures.I had a real grudge against his reader though.I think his name was Folsom.

LEVENSON:Ken[neth] Folsom?Why?

J. SERVICE: I think maybe the first blue book, some question about the T'ang Dynasty, and I didn't bother about dates because I just assumed from the question and from the level of the lectures that Mr. Levenson wasn't terribly interested in knowing whether or not we could memorize dates.At any rate, the date of the T'ang Dynasty was something I knew so well that I didn't think I needed to worry about it.

I got very acid notes in the margins: "after all; this is a history course; we need some dates." [laughter; tape off]

At the end of the first semester--we were still on the semester system then--they accepted me in the M.A. program in political science.So I was embarked as a graduate student.I was not really happy with political science.I always held that against John Fairbank.My mind is not the right kind.I don't find abstractions easy to deal with, and the jargon drives me out of my mind.

[462]

J. SERVICE: I really should have been in my first love--history.My real mind and bent is much more, I think, toward history than toward theory and political science.

LEVENSON:How did Berkley's political science department fall in the political spectrum at that time?

J. SERVICE:There was quite a feud going on then between the political theorists like Sheldon Wolin and the behaviorists.The behaviorists really won out.Wolin left.

Berkeley seemed to me to be overly academic.They look down on schools like Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as being a "trade school," and so on.

This was the trouble with their Ph.D. program, as far as I was concerned.I couldn't escape things like theory and political behavior and American institutions.

I was much more interested in international relations and the Far East.But I couldn't really concentrate on that.I could include them as two of my fields, but I had to have two other fields in which I really didn't have the slightest bit of interest.

LEVENSON:Would you say that that's perhaps one of the reasons that over the years there have been relatively few candidates from Berkeley for the Foreign Service?This is something that has concerned me.

J. SERVICE:I think definitely, yes.There have been some.But a man who is interested in the Foreign Service is much more apt to go to a school which is more practically inclined like the School of Advanced International Studies at Hopkins, or Tufts.

LEVENSON:How were you received by the other students?How did you feel as a nice, elderly graduate student?

J. SERVICE:Most of them just thought of me as a pleasant old fellow, I suppose.[laughter] Actually I made some good friends with a number of students.Some of them were older students. They are not all young students at Berkeley by any means.

I was a reader for Chalmers for one of his courses.I made more money than he told Jack Kahn [$1.37 an hour], but I don't remember just how much I did make.

I found out about the Center for Chinese Studies and went down and introduced myself, went to some of their bag lunches and affairs.I spent a half year sort of getting up to the starting line.So it took me two years to get the M.A.I got the M.A. in the spring of '64.

[463]

J. SERVICE:Chalmers asked me once if I would be interested in working at the Center for Chinese Studies.I told him that this would be to my mind the best possible thing.

I had been passed with distinction in my M.A. exams which meant that I could go on for the Ph.D. I actually started it but by this time I had rather lost interest in the Ph.D. in political science.I really wasn't convinced I wanted to be a professor.But I did want to have a job and that's why I had come to Berkeley and come back to an academic community.I wanted a job in or near or around the periphery of a university.

A Job at the Center for Chinese Studies

J. SERVICE:In the summer of '64 the center offered me a half time job as sort of supervisor-curator of the library.They had a professional librarian, a woman.She was from Taiwan and was educated in Taiwan.She knew almost nothing about mainland history or people, materials, books. So they needed somebody as a reference librarian and also to help on acquisitions.

LEVENSON:Who was then chairman at the center?

J. SERVICE:Li Choh-ming was just going out, and Franz Schurmann was just coming in.

LEVENSON:What was the original purpose of the center?I forget exactly when it was founded. It was late 50's, wasn't it?

J. SERVICE:Yes.I think actually'57 was when it was founded, but it didn't really start functioning until '58.It became apparent during the 50's, in the academic world at least, that we were losing out on a generation of China scholars. Our isolation from China, and McCarthyism were discouraging academic people from making a specialty of China, especially in the social sciences.

The Ford Foundation got interested.Some people here at Berkeley pushed and got a fairly sizable grant from Ford to set up a Center for Chinese Studies.Other centers were set up at Michigan, Columbia, and Harvard.

LEVENSON:As I recall, its mandate was limited to Communist China.

J. SERVICE:That's right.Well, to contemporary China which was interpreted as being Communist China.A rather heavy emphasis was put on social sciences, which meant for a while that historians were sort of second-rate citizens and the humanities were completely out of the picture.

[464]

J. SERVICE:This hurt a lot of feelings here at Berkeley.Of course, people like Bingham whose field was the T'ang Dynasty were completely out of the picture, although I think that he had been one of the people supporting the center.A lot of the Oriental Language people were out, although Professor Ch'en Shih-hsiang was in, I think, from the very start.

The first chairman had been a man in economics, I can't think of his name.

LEVENSON:Walter Galenson.

J. SERVICE:Galenson, of course.Then Li Choh-ming who was in the School of Business Administration, but was an economist-- Here again it was a perfect case of Berkeley's sort of hyper-scholarliness that a man like Li Choh-ming, who was a very competent economist, couldn't get a job in the department of economics because they didn't believe in area specialization.Economics are economics, and therefore we don't need to have anybody with special knowledge of China and the Far East.

LEVENSON:I didn't know that.

J. SERVICE:That's why he got an appointment in the Department of Business Administration, through Clark Kerr, I believe.

LEVENSON:Then, as I recall, the center was, by university decision, put quite a long way west from the university in the town center, above Woolworth's.

J. SERVICE:The university said they didn't have space, and as long as we had funds from [The] Ford [Foundation] and Ford didn't object to some of those funds going to pay rent, why, the university just didn't offer us space.That was all.

LEVENSON:However, it definitely did remove the center from the hub of campus activities.

J. SERVICE:Oh, very much.

LEVENSON:It made it hard for university people to incorporate it into their lives.

J. SERVICE:But it did increase the togetherness, the collegiality, of the small group that were permanently down there, the staff, and the students who were fellows at the center.We were probably more of a group then, but we were isolated.We were completely off the campus, and we very rarely went on to the campus.

[465]

The Government Settles out of Court on Legal Costs, Pay Arrears, and Retirement, 1963

J. SERVICE: All this time our case was getting nowhere in the Court of Claims for various reasons. Ed Rhetts had been promised a political appointment.He had worked for [Hubert] Humphrey in the early days of the 1960 campaign.He'd been promised a job in sort of an agreement between Humphrey and Kennedy and he eventually was appointed ambassador to Liberia.So he had to pull out of the case.

In '62 Joe Rauh, who was an old friend of mine--I think I mentioned before--took over the case.On a home leave in '61 we'd had a hearing before the commissioner of the Court of Claims, a preliminary hearing to settle the facts.We had to deal with our same old antagonist in the Department of Justice, Mr. MacGuineas, who was just as nasty in the Court of Claims as he had been in the other courts.He tried to introduce the substantive issues of violation of security and all the rest of it.

LEVENSON:Doesn't sound relevant.

J. SERVICE:It wasn't relevant.

LEVENSON:What were the issues?

J. SERVICE:Back pay, my legal costs, and the level of my retirement benefits.The government insists on deducting everything you earned on the outside, you see. They will not pay what you would have earned in full because they deduct your earnings.Then there was a lot of hassling over what I would have earned in the State Department because that depended on whether I got automatic pay increases, whether I got in-step, within class, step increases and so on.

But, in '63 Joe Rauh finally got people at a higher level in the Department of Justice, above Mr. MacGuineas, to be reasonable about it, and they settled out of court.I got about $32,000, which was not nearly what we felt we should have, but it represented roughly, I think, the actual costs we could show we'd put into the case.

I had a check, for instance, for $24,000, payment to Rhetts.I had paid something to the other lawyer who had helped in the Supreme Court.I'm not sure whether this is what the Department of Justice based it on or not.They included costs, for instance, of moving to New York and back from New York and so on.But, this seemed to be the figure they used.

[466]

J. SERVICE:The main part of it was that they recognized that I had been reinstated at the wrong level, in other words, that I should have been reinstated at a higher level.So this increased my retirement pay.All this is in the Service papers.

LEVENSON:Did you feel in the end that you had been treated shabbily?

J. SERVICE:Yes, to be perfectly honest about it.Yes, I think the whole business of deducting your outside earnings is a shabby trick for the United States government to do.If I had been a wealthy man, so that I could have afforded not to get a job outside, presumably I'd be entitled to claim all my pay.But because I had to go out and get a job in order for my family to live, and because I had been reasonably successful, all that gets taken away.I don't think this was fair treatment at all.

LEVENSON:Nor do I.

J. SERVICE:Certainly not to have to fight in the courts for six years.After all I was reinstated in 1957, and it took six more years of very unpleasant nastiness with the Department of Justice to finally get this out of court settlement.I think it was definitely shabby.

Putting Down Roots

J. SERVICE:We had a very good time in Berkeley when we came back.We looked around for a house for a while and didn't find anything immediately.Then we rented a house down here on San Antonio Road, a house actually that belonged to a man named Olney, who at that time was in Washington as administrative head of U.S. courts.He was an officer directly under the chief justice.

LEVENSON:Is that Warren Olney?

J. SERVICE:Yes.

LEVENSON:He's one of our interviewees (See Warren Olney, III:Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration in the Earl Warren Era, in process, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley).

[467]

J. SERVICE:Oh really?Well, it was Warren Olney's house-- small world department.

Before we rented the house I wanted to be sure that he knew that I was engaged in a lawsuit against the U.S. government.He laughed.He said he couldn't see that made any difference [laughter] to his job at any rate.

I joined one of the California Democratic clubs, the Grassrooters.A lot of faculty people were there.We used to meet in different people's homes.It got very active around the time of the Free Speech Movement, which started fairly soon after I started working at the center.[1964]One of our fellows, Riskin, was quite an active leader in the Free Speech Movement.We were very much taken up in that.

I joined the Unitarian Fellowship.I had a great feeling of wanting to put down roots, I think, to establish contacts.Caroline didn't have that feeling nearly as much as I did.

I had a great desire, having had my political experience before, I wanted to get into politics.There were no objections this time.I became a party worker, a precinct worker, passing out literature--I've been in all the Democratic houses anyway in this part of Berkeley, passing out literature.I worked for [Eugene] McCarthy and then for [George] McGovern.

I was also a voting official.I became a precinct inspector.Then I was called for jury duty, and rather to my surprise, I was not rejected.It was a civil jury.I sat on five or six cases, and in all except one I was elected foreman of the jury [laughter], mainly I think by just being the oldest man there and not saying very much.

I should mention that I went through something like a sport car menopause, I think, at this period.I had always wanted to have a sport car and never had been able to, so I started out with an Austin Healey Sprite. [laughter]It was a little too small and light, so then I shifted to an MGB.Caroline didn't like that, and an open car does have some disadvantages.Next I had a Rover 2000 TC, which was terrific.But even that didn't persuade Caroline that good cars are meant to go around corners fairly fast.[laughter]All that engineering is to make them corner well.But Caroline just doesn't like to go around corners.

LEVENSON:Did you run into any difficulties after you came back to Berkeley?

J. SERVICE:Well, that's the next chapter here.

[468]

Some Right-Wing Flurries about Jack's Working at the University

J. SERVICE:Almost as soon as I took the half-time job at the center I got a call from some small paper down in Orange County, some very unpleasant person wanting to know whether the university knew about my background and whether they gave me any sort of a loyalty check or anything before they gave me the job.

It turned out that he was on the mailing list, I suppose, as I'm sure lots of other small town right-wing newspapers are, for hearings of the Internal Security Subcommittee, my old friends.So I went to the library and got the hearings.

It turned out that there was a long controversy going on in August, 1964, between the Department of State and the Internal Security Subcommittee.They were still having the big battle over Otepka's case, and they were trying to make all the difficulty possible for the State Department.

They had a memo or knew of a memo, which I suppose I might insert here.But they argued for several days with various State Department officials trying to get the State Department officials to give them a copy of this memorandum, which contained information from a third agency about my employment.

Allen Whiting, the principal witness, was in the FE branch of INR, the intelligence research section of the State Department.They had various other people.The State Department people said, "We can't reveal the contents of the memo because it's privileged, coming from a third agency."

LEVENSON:Did they identify the agency?

J. SERVICE: No, the agency was never identified.We don't know whether it was the FBI or the CIA.

Finally at the conclusion of these hearings, Mr. Sourwine, who was the counsel of the committee, brings out a copy of the memorandum and asks the man, "Is this it?"They had it all along.Otepka presumably had stolen it from the Department, handed it to the committee.At any rate, here's the memo.It tells the whole story.[tape off]

[469]

LEVENSON:I'd like to elucidate some of these points.I see this memorandum is from R.L. Berry to Allen Whiting, dated July 21, and refers to a memorandum of June 10, 1964.When were you actually hired at the center?

J. SERVICE:My employment had been talked about by June 10, but I didn't start work until July 1, 1964.

LEVENSON:But the memo reads, "On July 8, I conversed privately with Schurmann," et cetera, "and he was pleased at the idea and didn't show the slightest reservation about the appointment." He says he "fails to understand what is implied by the source's comment that this appointment, which was made at the recommendation of Scalapino over the objections of Franz Schurmann, places the governmental agencies interested in intelligence matters in the Far East in an awkward position, and Fong feels for that reason it should be brought to the attention of Whiting."

Who is Fong?

J. SERVICE:No one knows.I don't know who Fong is, whether he's someone in Taiwan, or whether he's a Chinese [from Taiwan] informant of the FBI or CIA or what.There's nobody in the center named Fong.But, there were people in the center who were very close to the Chinese consulate at that time.

The interesting thing, of course, is that Scalapino really had nothing whatever to do with my appointment.As far as I know, Chalmers was the man that suggested it.At this time Scalapino was in the dog house in Taiwan.So whoever is putting this in is trying to smear Scalapino and make Scalapino look bad.

LEVENSON:And you.

J. SERVICE:Yes, of course.

LEVENSON:And the university.

J. SERVICE:That's right.Franz didn't object at all.Franz was, as far as I know and as he's always said, very enthusiastic about the idea.This was done by a person who wanted to give a kick to Scalapino, and wanted to give a boost or protect Franz Schurmann.

LEVENSON:That's really very interesting and particularly in terms of the way people's political perspectives change, to identify Scalapino as then being somewhat radical and Schurmann then as being somewhat conservative.These labels have become meaningless.

[470]

J. SERVICE:Sourwine, who was the very nasty and unpleasant counsel (J.G. Sourwine, chief counsel of the Internal Security Subcommittee, U.S. Senate), was trying to push Whiting into saying that someone in the State Department had recommended my appointment.He was trying to establish some link that the State Department was interested in finding me a job.It is almost an echo of the old McCarthy hearing, that even though I'd been fired I was still working for the CIA.It was the same idea, that the State Department was trying to help me out or find me employment.

LEVENSON:Did this have any further repercussions?

J. SERVICE:Not as far as I know.Clark Kerr told me that, "Oh yes, they did have some"--I forget just how he put it, but there were some noises made about my being employed, but that the university was not concerned.

A little sheet that was published down here in Oakland called Tocsin published an article about my working for the university.

LEVENSON:Nineteen sixty-five.

J. SERVICE:Yes, that's later on.

LEVENSON:Is this a Catholic paper?

J. SERVICE:I forget.I can't tell you much about this.[laughter]It's a right-wing paper.I don't think we need to do much with that.

LEVENSON:I believe that I may have brought you a copy of this.Do you remember?

J. SERVICE:You mean you brought me that?I don't know where I got it.

LEVENSON:I know what happened to the copy I brought you because Caroline dumped it in the fire.

J. SERVICE:Oh really? I m much more inclined to hang on to things [laughing], masochism.

LEVENSON:As an experienced political observer, how did you respond to the upheavals on campus and in Berkeley which really started with the Free Speech Movement in 1964?

[470a]

TOCSIN
THE WEST'S LEADING ANTI-COMMUNIST WEEKLY

COPYRIGHT BY TOCSIN, INC. 1965
Vol. 6. No. 5
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, FEBRUARY 11, 1965
20 Cents

Security Case Star Works at UC Center

John Stewart Service, former State Department foreign service officer in pre-Red China and the star of well-publicized loyalty-security hearings, is living in Berkeley and working for the University of California.

He is employed at the University's Center for Chinese Studies at 2168 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley.

Service, who was identified as having "many contacts" with the Communist Party in testimony of Louis F. Budenz. was fired by the State Department in 1951 after an adverse ruling by the Civil Service Commission's Loyalty Review Board.

Budenz, former managing editor of the Communist Daily Worker, described Service as one of the persons within the State Department on whom the Communist Party relied to put over its policy in the Far East prior to the Communist takeover.

The Budenz testimony, given on Aug. 23, 1951, was part of a lengthy investigation conducted by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee into the Institute of Pacific Relations.The IPR was a research organization which came under the control of a core of Communists and pro-Communists and turned into an instrument of pro-Soviet propaganda favorable to the Communist takeover of China.

Both Service and a State Department colleague, John Carter Vincent, were actively associated with the IPR.Vincent was named under oath as a member of the Communist Party.

Service was arrested in June 1945 by FBI agents for having turned over secret State Department documents to editors of the Communist magazine Amerasia.In 1957 the Supreme Court ruled that the Secretary of State did not have the power to dismiss Service.Reinstated, he later became consul general in Liverpool.

Entered as an exhibit in the IPR hearings was an article from the Daily Worker for Nov. 28, 1945, by the paper's then foreign editor.Joseph Starobin, in which Stewart and Vincent are lauded us "liberal elements" in the State Department who had opposed the reappointment of Patrick Hurley as ambassador to Chungking.The Communist movement had long sought Hurley's removal for his "openly anti- Soviet" policies.

Budenz explained that the inclusion of the names of Stewart and Vincent in the article, which appeared immediately after Hurley's resignation, was significant."They are being recommended as people who stand for the things that the Daily Worker stands for," he said.

Starobin, author of the article, is the father of Robert Starobin, now a teaching assistant in the UC History Department and one of the early backers of the recent "free speech" rebellion.Young Starobin was arrested in San Francisco "civil rights" demonstrations last spring.

[471]

J. SERVICE:Well, I was an interested and active spectator, yes.I was sympathetic and angry and so on.I felt the same anger that everyone else did, and I marched in the big parade at People's Park [1969], the big march, you remember.

I got into difficulties, I think, with Chalmers who has always been a very good friend, although we disagree very much.Our whole outlook is quite different.We got into difficulties really only during the Cambodia phase.

One of the big pluses, of course, about my whole job at the center was that it gave me very close contact with a number of graduate students, most of them very mature and responsible graduate students.My attitude toward the whole CCAS [Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars] endeavor was quite different from Professor Johnson's.

He got a report that they had taken over the center at one point, became very angry, and was annoyed at me because I had allowed them to have meetings there.I was there--not at the meeting, but on the premises--and I didn't feel that they were in any danger of taking over the center.

The CCAS people were not the people that were boycotting or disrupting Scalapino's classes.Our people were not engaged in things like that.That was the Red Star Commune or something like that, a very different type of outfit, I think a lot of them were party members, Communists or near-Communists.

Ph.D. Thesis Doctor and Occasional Editor

J. SERVICE:From my point of view, the job at the center was very satisfactory.It soon became a full-time job.

After two or three years, I was offered a job by a new organization, a Chinese materials center in Washington, D.C.They wanted me to take that over and run it.It was under the American Library Association.

I declined the job, but I think that the people at the center felt that I had to be given a roughly similar salary here, which they didn't need to do.But it was very nice of them.So, I got pushed up so Specialist I.This meant a salary that was a burden to the center.I was quite content to work three-quarter time or something like that, sometimes half-time.I very seldom actually drew full-time salary, although generally I worked the full day, but felt I could quit early if I wanted to.

[472]

J. SERVICE:The job itself wasn't always busy or demanding.Very often I had little to do.So, I started editing.

I was quite willing to edit or sometimes rewrite articles written by people at the center.I became a sort of Ph.D. thesis doctor.

Phil Lilienthal, whom I'd known for many years--he was out in China working for the IPR [Institute of Pacific Relations] in 1940 or '41--Lilienthal found out about my interest and asked me if I'd like to do some editing for the University of California Press.So I started doing occasional jobs for them, reading manuscripts, things like that.

Eventually there was a summer session at the University of Hawaii on libraries, particularly Oriental libraries.I went over and attended the summer school.It convinced me--by then the library was growing--that we needed a good, full-time professional librarian.

Our Chinese librarian had to leave.Her husband worked for Boeing, and he was transferred to Seattle.I had met a man in Hawaii that I thought would do the job well. They agreed, and I persuaded him to come here.We talked to various people, but the man from Hawaii was obviously the best one.

He came and he's been here ever since.He is a very good man, C.P. Chen [Chi-ping].With him in the library there was much less need for my help.He was quite competent in acquisitioning and reference and so on, so I became more, shall I say, an editor--particularly after Franz [Schurmann] finished his term as chairman in '67 and Chalmers Johnson came in.

Chalmers was quite interested in developing our publications program.He started the research monograph series.I became the editor of the research monographs.

A Friendly Meeting with Dean Acheson

J. SERVICE:About this time Dean Acheson came to the campus, and we had a pleasant meeting. He gave a talk in front of Dwinelle Hall. I think it was on our relations with the NATO alliance.

After the meeting he was walking across the campus with [Edward W.] Strong.Strong was still chancellor, so this was before the Free Speech Movement got very far.I went up and introduced myself as a brother of Dick Service's.He laughed.

[473]

J. SERVICE:We had a short chat walking across the campus, in which he pointed out that he'd had a hell of a time from his brother, Edward Acheson, whom I'd known in Chungking.His brother had been a civilian working for the army in Chungking.

Also, he commented on the fact that the affidavit he'd given the government about my discharge had helped me a good deal, which it had.It had been crucial really, in our case, and confirmed what we had already suspected, that he knew very well when he wrote the affidavit that it would be a helpful one, because his affidavit says that he did not use his own judgment or consider the evidence in the case, but simply relied on the decision of the Loyalty Review Board.This was the basis for our claim that the State Department had not followed its own regulations.

Amerasia Again:Government Publication of Kubek's Scurrilous Two-Volume The Amerasia Papers:A Clue to the Catastrophe of China, 1970

J. SERVICE: Early in 1970 various people got in touch with me about a new publication, a massive, two-volume thing that had been published by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, called The Amerasia Papers: A Clue to the Catastrophe of China, and urged me to get ahold of a copy and see it.I finally did.It nominally was an edited and annotated collection of the papers seized in Amerasia's offices at the time of the arrest in 1945.

But it had a long introduction, a hundred and seventeen pages I think it is, by a man named Anthony Kubek.It was really an attack on me, and based mainly, not on papers that had been seized in the Amerasia offices, but on my own personal collection of my reports that had been taken from my desk by the FBI and then later returned to me as being my own personal papers.

LEVENSON: How had he got hold of them?

J. SERVICE: Obviously the FBI had kept copies of this material and had given it to the committee, just as the FBI, of course, had leaked all my personal correspondence, address book and so on, to the minority counsel during the Tydings [committee hearings].In our own hearings before the L[loyalty] S[ecurity] B[oard], before the State Department board, this new material kept being brought in.

[474]

J. SERVICE:You see, it hadn't been in the State Department at all, but since they had given it to the minority committee of the Tydings committee, they had to give it then to the Loyalty Security Board.It continually was interjected, brought into our hearings.

At any rate, this really annoyed me a great deal because it was just a rehash of the Amerasia business.It was an attack on what Kubek called the cover-up of the Amerasia case, alleged all sorts of behind-the-scenes crookery, skullduggery, political pressure, and prevention of prosecution in the Amerasia case.It greatly exaggerated my importance in the whole thing because it gave primary emphasis to a lot of these reports of mine.

I wrote a memorandum in September, mainly attacking Kubek, hoping to call attention to the errors and unfairness in the attack.I tried to get the Association for Asian Studies to take a stand.They talked about it, but felt they couldn't.I thought of the American Historical Association.

John Fairbank suggested calm:let's not give Kubek the status of an historian.Kubek was not a member of the A[ssociation for] A[sian] S[tudies], so the AAS also really couldn't take any action.

My lawyers--Ed Rhetts was then back in Washington, and Joe Rauh--tried to talk to some of the members of the committee.Senator Ervin, Birch Bayh, and several others on the committee seemed potentially sympathetic.I was in Washington and we went around and called on them.We never could see the senators.We talked to their administrative assistants.

Birch Bayh said he was interested, but he was also thinking of running for president, and apparently he didn't want to do anything.We had a lot of nice talk, but no one actually would do anything.We doubted very much whether many of the committee had actually ever seen this or approved it.It had probably been done by the staff.

LEVENSON:Was this a government publication?

J. SERVICE:Oh yes, certainly.It was advertised by the Government Printing Office.

LEVENSON:How often does the Government Printing Office put out a two-volume, so-called scholarly job?Is this a unique occurrence?

J. SERVICE: Not entirely, but fairly unique [chuckling].They have to print, I think, things that the committees give them, but we felt that this was an unusually scurrilous thing.

At any rate, we got nowhere.

[475]

Jack's Monograph:The Amerasia Papers; Some Problems in the History of U.S.-China Relations, 1971

J. SERVICE:Some of my younger friends, particularly Orville Schell and Jim Peck, also Chalmers Johnson, urged me to do something, not quite so vindictive, not quite so concentrated on refuting Kubek, but also to talk about the policy angles of that period.

So I wrote my monograph, The Amerasia Papers:Some Problems in the History of U.S.-China Relations.It's not a very good title, but we wanted to have it next to Kubek in the library catalog file.

LEVENSON:Was it a relief to get down and write it out for publication?

J. SERVICE:Oh, yes.I got very wrapped up in it.By this time, we had not only all the documents, some of which I got for the first time this way, but also the U.S. Foreign Relations volumes for '44 and '45 had come out, so we had a lot more material than had been available before.

I did a job on what policy was at the time, which I think refutes the Hurley view, except that Hurley did win support from the president.You can argue whether United States foreign policy is what the State Department says it is and what the State Department is trying to carry out, or what the president, for his own perhaps temporary whim, actually does.Of course, the answer is it's what the president does.That's the weakness in my case.

Fulbright Hearings:Davies, Fairbank, and Service Testify:A One-Day Sensation

J. SERVICE:The center sent the Fulbright committee a copy of my monograph.I had known Fulbright slightly.I had negotiated one of the first Fulbright agreements, remember.When I came back from New Zealand in the Department I had met Fulbright.

At any rate, Fulbright had gotten a copy of my Amerasia Papers monograph.He had decided to have a hearing before his committee.It was to be an executive [closed] hearing.He had invited Fairbank, and John Davies who was in Washington, and me.I had agreed--We were to go in July, 1971, I think it was.After we had agreed to go, the news came out about Kissinger's having gone to Peking and Nixon planning a visit to Peking.

[476]

J. SERVICE: The committee meeting was closed, but when we came out of the committee room it was obvious that the committee or Fulbright had told the press about it.With the Kissinger visit and the tremendous hullabaloo about Nixon's visit to China [chuckling], all the TV people were set up.I recognized Roger Mudd and said, "My God, this really must be big stuff. They've got the first team here."He laughed.

Anyway, we were then interviewed by the press, somewhat to our consternation.John Fairbank is unflappable.We tried to get John to do most of the talking, but [laughter] we weren't entirely successful.At any rate, this was a great one-day sensation.

LEVENSON:I read the report of the committee.I found it most engaging, in violent contradistinction to the reports of the 40's and 50's.

J. SERVICE:This was the first committee, as I started out by saying, the first congressional committee that I'd ever been present at where I didn't need counsel.[laughter]

Yes, it was a very pleasant hearing.The mood was nice.

As a result of the publicity on the Fulbright hearings, a man named M. Stanton Evans, who was one of the people who talks on the CBS Spectrum news radio programs, sounded off on my appearance before the Fulbright committee and brought up again all the dope on the Amerasia case and my conversations with Jaffe.To my great surprise I got a call from CBS over here at KCBS in San Francisco, offering me a chance of a rebuttal, which was the first time that this had ever happened.

So, I went over and I had three minutes.I gave them my three minutes' worth, rebutting Stanton Evans.I don't know whether you want this for the appendix or not, but there it is.

LEVENSON:Did you get any feedback from that?

J. SERVICE:Oh, no.M. Stanton Evans, as far as I know, wasn't interested in continuing the debate.He just ignored it.A lot of people said, "We heard you on the radio."It's surprising how many people do listen.

Can we stop a minute while I go take a pill?[tape off]

[477]

Security Considerations:The Service Recommendation Not the Kiss of Death for Foreign Service Applicants

J. SERVICE:Something has just come into my mind.I've been making notes, but I forgot to make a note of this.Going back to my hearing, my security hearings after my reinstatement, 1958, one of the things that surprised me was that this man Otepka raised questions about some of the people whom I knew like Ed Snow, and particularly he objected to my knowing a man named Fritz Silber, who's the husband of Priscilla Yard, the woman who loaned me $5,000 to buy the Sarco stock.This surprised me because it indicated that they'd had some sort of surveillance, either telephone or mail, to have known that I had been seeing some of these people.

I challenged him:"You say that I should not have known these people.How am I to know? What about them? What is their status?"Of course, he wouldn't provide any information.His comeback was that I should have known better.He wouldn't supply any information as to why I should not have had contact with these people.Well, that just is a footnote to the security hearings.

LEVENSON:To move on from that, did you have anxiety through the sixties in Berkeley about associations with Communists, whether you knew they were Communists or not?We had Bettina Aptheke, a leader in the Free Speech Movement, for instance, who announced that she was a party member.

J. SERVICE:I just didn't have any associations with those particular people.I was perfectly convinced, perfectly confident in my own mind, that none of the people at the center that I was associated with were Communists.Kahn reports some conversation, which I think might be with Chalmers Johnson, about my asking something about Communists.I can't remember what Chalmers may be referring to.I think that it was about some paper or article that I was asked to read and comment on, which I thought was just a presentation of the Communist point of view.

I think that I did feel that my job perhaps was in jeopardy at the time of the Cambodia [protests], which was the climax as far as the center was concerned, because of my friendship with and membership in the CCAS.But it was something that never came to a head, was never really argued out, and rather quickly passed over.

LEVENSON: Did you have contacts through those years with some of the State Department people like Joe Jaeger who came out to assess campus opinion on the war in Vietnam, and I'm sure there were others.

[478]

J. SERVICE:No, I didn't, but I did have several interviews with SY [Security] Service.People who were investigating people applying for the Foreign Service.

LEVENSON:Oh really?

J. SERVICE:Of course it was known on the campus that I had been in the Foreign Service. There's a sort of a Foreign Service fraternity here, people who are interested in foreign government service, not necessarily State Department.I was asked several times to talk to them.

Several people who became acquainted with me [in the] political science department or otherwise, came and talked with me before applying for the Foreign Service.Some of these people gave me as a reference.I talked to, I think it was at least three of these investigators.Those people all got into the Foreign Service, or were approved.One of them didn't go in the service, but two of them went in.

LEVENSON:So that your recommendation –

J. SERVICE:Was not the kiss of death.

First Signs of a Change in U.S.-China Policy:Jack One of Four Americans Who Would be Welcome in China

J. SERVICE:About this same time, out of the blue, we got a post card from Edgar Snow from Pao-an, where he had gone in 1936 before the Communists set up their headquarters in Yenan, and where he first met Mao Tse-tung.

Somehow, to get a post card from Pao-an, China, from Ed Snow seemed like a message from the moon.Of course, things were moving.That was the real reason the Eastland committee brought out the Kubek--books to try to head off any move towards China by the Nixon administration.

Nixon started in fairly promptly with gestures toward relaxing our isolation of China.First he took off the strict boycott and then raised the limit on purchases that could be made, various things like that. Travel restrictions were withdrawn.American subsidiaries abroad, foreign subsidiaries of American companies were allowed to trade with China.

[479]

J. SERVICE:On October 1, 1970, Ed Snow was invited to stand with Mao and the other leaders on Tian-an Men during the national day parade. The ping-pong team invitation was a few months later.Kissinger's secret visit was in July, '71.By August, the New York Times had gotten Scotty [James] Reston into China.Reston had a marathon interview with Chou En-lai, which was broken by an intermission for dinner.At the dinner table, there was some reference to the obvious fact that attitudes were changing from the former rigidities.It was Reston, apparently, who recalled that a number of Americans had suffered rather heavily because of their early views about the Chinese Communists.Perhaps, Reston suggested, it would be especially interesting to them to see the changes in China.

Chou seized on the idea with his characteristic alacrity, and spontaneously mentioned four persons who would be warmly welcomed in China "if they should wish to come."I was one of the four. The other three were John Fairbank, Owen Lattimore, and John Carter Vincent.The first I knew of this was a telephone call from somebody at the Times in New York asking what I thought about "being invited to China."The story had just come in by radio from Peking and wouldn't be appearing in the papers until the next day.I collected my wits enough to say that I indeed would like to visit China.

LEVENSON:What did you think of that?

J. SERVICE:I thought it was great stuff.I was very pleased, of course.I wrote to Marshall Green, who was assistant secretary for FE and asked him if the Department would have any objection, and got the answer, no objection; to the contrary, they'd be pleased if I were to go.They were obviously fostering contacts.

I then wrote to Huang Hua, an old friend, who was then the Chinese ambassador in Ottawa.Canada had already established relations with China, and he was the first Chinese ambassador in Ottawa.I wrote to him, alluding to the news story and saying that I would indeed be glad to go to China.

He wrote back saying that I was invited.I had asked for Caroline to be included, so he was happy to tell me that we were invited to be guests of the Chinese government for a month or something of this sort.

[480]

Back to China with Caroline, 1971

J. SERVICE:I'm not sure that we want to say a great deal about the China trip.It was a very moving experience simply to go back to China and see the changes, see what had happened, see a lot of old friends, not so many Chinese friends as foreign friends, the Adlers, Rewi Alley, people like that who stayed in China or, like Adler, had gone back to China.

The Chinese friends were most of them too old or too high up or their political health wasn't particularly good at the time.Some of them, of course, had died.My very good friend Ch'en Chia-k'ang had died, apparently of a heart attack, in a May 7 school, so I was told. Kung P'eng, the wife of Chiao Kuan-hua, at that time deputy foreign minister, had died.Another good friend named Wang Ping-nan, who was in Chungking during the war, was apparently in a May 7 school, and unavailable.

Then the older people like Chu Teh, Tung Pi-wu and others were simply too high or too old.I tried to see Madame Sun, but she wasn't very well, I was told, so I didn't see her.

Meetings with Chou En-lai

LEVENSON:What about Chou En-lai?

J. SERVICE:We had several meetings with Chou En-lai, very pleasant.First was a session fairly early in October where he talked to all the Americans in China--and there were quite a group of us -- and a few non-Americans brought in like Rewi Alley.I kidded him about being an honorary American. [chuckling]

LEVENSON:Was he from New Zealand?

J. SERVICE:Yes, legendary New Zealander.

We actually met first at an October 1 dinner.But after a handshake, Chou En-lai was at a table far away; we didn't have a chance to talk to him.He and Chiang Ch'ing were up at the head table, along with others, of course.

Then we had this interview with the Americans in which Chou picked me out and said quite a number of things to me or about me.Later on before we left China, Caroline and I were invited to a meeting with him, which happened to be just the day after the Chinese had been accepted in the UN.

[480a]

Los Angeles Times

Wed. Jan. 14, 1976-Part II 5

Chou En-lai, as Seen by an Old China Hand

Whether in 1941 or 1971, He Always Had the Rare Gift of Instant Rapport

BY JOHN S. SERVICE

Few people who met Chou En-lai face to face were likely to forget him.He carried an aura of magnetic vitality.Being handsome was part.But one's first impression was caught by the eyes. Below the black, bushy, upward-tilted eyebrows, the eyes were bright, penetrating and looked right at you.You felt that you had all his attention, that he would remember you--and what you said. It was a rare gift of instant rapport.

It was like this when I first met him in Chungking in 1941.He was then a semi-diplomatic representative from the Chinese Communists in Yenan, who were growing in stature but not yet taken seriously by many as rivals for the national power of Chiang Kai-shek; and I, a young officer of the American Embassy--a Third Secretary, in fact, than whom in diplomatic terms there is no one more lowly.It was still the same, 30 years later in 1971, when I greeted him in Peking as the long enduring premier of China.The only changes seemed to be that his up-combed pompadour of black hair had lost its "un-Chinese" suggestion of waviness and had turned iron gray; and that his body, once fond oflounging gracefully in an easy chair, now showed some of the stiffness of age.

After that first meeting in 1941 and up until April, 1945, I had much opportunity to get beyond that vivid first impression.Talk was important in Yenan, in northwest China, the Communist head-quarters in those years.This was true within the Communist Party--to iron out differences, evaluate the shifting political balances in China and fit their policies to what they expected the future to bring.It was also true in their treatment of the few foreigners present.For we, and especially we Americans, were then an important part of the wartime political equation within China, and of China s uncertain future.

How committed, for instance, was the United States to the support of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Chinese government?Talking to Americans, then, was obviously important among Chou's several party roles.To it, he devoted unflagging energy and endless patience.

I watched him over those years as he met many American visitors, high or low, civilian or military, sophisticated in Chinese affairs or completely uninformed.Yet no ignorance seemed to dismay him, nor was any question dismissed as too trivial or irrelevant.Indeed, no matter how trying the circumstances, I never saw him show boredom, annoyance or fatigue.

(Photo caption)
Chou En-lai

Then (as later in Peking) the time of day--or night--seemed to matter little.In the simple, informal life of Yenan, where many lived in caves in the hillsides, he might stop by the sparsely furnished cave I shared with Col. David Barrett, commander of the U.S. Army observer group, known as "Dixie Mission."Or if I visited Chou's cave at the party headquarters across the river, Teng Ying-chao, his charming wife and companion of the Long March and a lifetime of revolution, brewed
tea and asked that I stay for potluck.

Nor was there any bureaucratic scheduling that cut an interview short.It was natural to talk as long as the participants had something they wished to say.Astonishingly, this habit, too, persisted into his last years of activity in Peking when his duties as the executive head of government must have been enough to swamp more ordinary men.

My wife and I were suddenly called to see him the day after Henry Kissinger had left Peking (on his second pre-Nixon visit in October, 1971), which was also the day after China had been voted into the United Nations.We were surprised:it seemed the worst possible day to be imposing on the premier's time.Nonetheless, the talk lasted for an uninterrupted three hours.

Come to think of it, there was one interruption--of a sort.At one point a young woman came into the room and walked silently up to Chou's chair bearing a small tray with a glass of water and two pills.He took the pills and a gulp of water, made a small grimace and went on talking without a break in his thought.

Those Chungking and Yenan talks with Chou were always a cerebral exercise, but a very pleasant one.He was urbane and good-humored, alert yet not tense and edgy, witty without sarcasm or malice, amazingly quick at grasping your thought but never impatient with your stumbling effort to state it, mentally

[480b]

agile without being tricky, adroit without being bombastic.He was ever willing to meet an issue head on, yet always searching for areas of agreement.

One watched an active, purposeful, disciplined and extremely well-organized mind.He was, of course, trying to move us toward his (and his party's) views of China and the world--things that he believed in deeply and sincerely.But it was an effort that depended on calm reason, clear statements couched in moderate terms, a broad knowledge of history and the world, and an astonishing grasp of fact and detail.One was to be persuaded (or educated), but not overwhelmed or scorned for disagreeing.

At the same time, one felt that Chou regarded all these talks with Americans as having another value.Our reactions and attitudes--whatever they might be and even if they related to China--had a practical usefulness to him in the hope of better understanding the broader views and probable policies of a distant, enigmatic, and to them largely unknown America.

It was always a matter of give-and-take.He was frank and outspoken, and he expected the same. Disagreement did not upset him (he probably expected a good deal), but one sensed disappointment if you could not support that disagreement in intelligent terms.

So, to Chou, we were probing for a better knowledge and understanding of the Chinese Communists.And Chou, through Americans in China, was probing for an understanding of the United States.But the exchange was uneven:Chou was more articulate and adroit than we, and an authoritative spokesman for the Communists; we were only junior officers representing policy-makers in faraway Washington, whose thinking we knew only slightly.

And then history played a trick.The importance of the authoritative knowledge that Chou and Mao Tse-tung gave us was not recognized by President Franklin Roosevelt and the American policy-makers.And the impressions that Chou and the other Chinese leaders may have gained from Americans in China--at least until the new U.S. ambassador, Gen. Patrick J. Hurley, had been some time in the country and made his bed with Chiang Kai-shek--proved unreliable because we were so far removed in rank and distance from the policy center in Washington.

In January, 1945, before the die of American policy was finally cast, Chou was astute enough to realize the problem.He asked to come to Washington so that he could talk to President Roosevelt and learn, "from the horse's mouth," where America stood on the vital issues that concerned the Communists.That hope was thwarted by Ambassador Hurley.Historian Barbara Tuchman is probably right to doubt whether, at that late stage, it could have changed history.But it certainly would have called for a virtuoso performance by one of the world's most brilliant and persuasive diplomats.

Instead, as we know, Roosevelt and Stalin strangely found that their mutually unrealistic views on China coincided.So we had the Yalta agreement.That made inevitable a Chinese civil war in which the United States was hopelessly tied to the side of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang.And thus was needlessly sealed the unhappy course of American-Chinese relations for the next 27 years.

Chou lived to see the reversal of this policy and the beginnings of the American detente he had sought so long ago.It was unfortunate that American dilatoriness in implementing the Shanghai communiqué, signed by President Nixon four years ago, robbed him of seeing it brought closer to fruition.

(Born in China of missionary parents, John S. Service was a U.S. Foreign Service officer
and China specialist attached to the U.S. Army in the 1940s.He was dismissed by the State
Department in 1951 during the McCarthy period, and was later vindicated by the Supreme
Court and reinstated.Retired since 1962, he is editor of research publications at the Center for
Chinese Studies, UC-Berkeley.)

[481]

J. SERVICE:I was surprised.We were about to leave, and apparently he determined that he was going to see us.So, we were crowded in although the meeting went on for, I think, almost three hours.

He didn't want to talk very much about the old times.I had hoped to get him to talk something about Hurley and that period of history I was involved in.But, he sort of brushed it aside, [saying,] "That's all past.Let's talk about the present."

LEVENSON:Did you have a feeling of an old friendship renewed?

J. SERVICE:Very much so.He's a very warm, intent, sincere person.He remembered me very well.

That evening when the Americans were there he started thinking about who was around whom I had known.He suddenly thought of an old, now an old, man named K'o Po-nien, who had been one of the liaison officers assigned to our group in Yenan.He later on became ambassador to Denmark and had various other diplomatic posts.He'd been a professor of history at some university before he joined the Communists.

This was eleven o'clock at night, I think, by the time we were at this stage of the interview with all the Americans around in a huge circle in this big room in the Great Hall of the People. He sent a word [loudly], "Call K'o Po-nien. Get him here!" [laughter]

So poor old K'o was routed out of bed, I'm sure. He arrived sleepy-eyed and blinking. Chou insisted a chair be brought in so he could be seated next to me.

There was a great deal of warmth, and Chou made a lot of complimentary references to me.The picture we've got downstairs, I think is quite characteristic.You've seen it.

When we had the private meeting with him he asked about old friends whom he'd known, Fairbank and Lattimore and various other people, about Dave Barrett who, after the Communists took over Peking, had been accused of fostering a plot against Mao's life.

That was a crazy, sort of a wild-eyed intelligence thing.It's a long story which we don't need to go into here.The Chinese had accused Barrett of providing money for the plotters who were supposedly using an old trench mortar from about a mile away to try to hit [chuckling] Mao Tse-tung while he stood on Tian-an Men.

LEVENSON: When was this, '49?

[482]

J. SERVICE: Yes, this was '49.

At any rate, he said, "Mistakes were made and we're very sorry.Give my best regards to Colonel Barrett."

It was very, very warm and pleasant.

LEVENSON: Did you have any opportunity to raise the question of Mao's supposed request to come to America in '45?

J. SERVICE:No.If we had had a chance to talk about that period-- this was one of the questions I had in mind.But, he didn't want to have a historical session, so, I never did.

LEVENSON:Was your impression of him that he was well versed in international affairs?

J. SERVICE:Oh, very well versed, most certainly.

Chou was a person with all the intellectual capacities of a Kissinger.I think no one had any better mind than he did.He had traveled a great deal, of course, as premier and as foreign minister.He'd been at the Geneva conference and the Bandung conference and many conferences around the world.He toured Africa.He was not parochial or ill-informed at all.

I think the Chinese do tend to put too much credence in foreign movements that they hope are strong.When we were there some of the Black Panther people were in Peking.They had some Puerto Rican group, the Young Lords from New York.They had one of these splinter Communist groups, a split off from the Socialist Workers Party.The Socialist Workers Party had gone against the Chinese because of their being willing to receive Nixon.Then one group split off, and they were invited to Peking.

You had the feeling that perhaps they gave these people more importance than they really had.But I don't think that Chou himself was naive at all.

Our private talk was mainly a tour of the horizon kind of thing.

LEVENSON:Briefing you?

J. SERVICE:Yes.

LEVENSON:With the idea that you should take a message back with you?

[483]

J. SERVICE:Well, I suppose so.Huang Hua asked me to come to Ottawa to pick up the visas before we went to China.I had told Huang Hua, so there would be no misunderstanding, that I wasn't going to China as a representative of the government, I wasn't going to China as a writer, but I expected I would probably write something, and that anything I was told or learned should, I thought, also be reported to my government .

So Chou knew that I would be interviewed.So it's possible that he was talking partly to the U.S. government, but Kissinger had just been there.I guess it was the day after Kissinger left.

Kissinger in Peking:An "Invitation" to San Clemente for Thanksgiving

J. SERVICE: While Kissinger was in Peking, I was asked to talk to him.The way they put it was that Kissinger had heard I was there and asked to see me.Well I doubt that, because the eventual conversation made it quite apparent that Kissinger was very foggy about who I was.

LEVENSON:When you say "they," do you mean Chinese officials?

J. SERVICE:The Chinese, yes.

LEVENSON:What was your impression of Kissinger?

J. SERVICE:He's a very smart, intelligent, quick person.But I made a mistake.There were two other people there.There was [John] Holdridge and a man named Al Jenkins from the State Department.Holdridge, I think, was National Security Council, and Jenkins was State Department. They were present and I thought that they wanted my impressions of China.I'd been in China at this time for over a month.

So, I was talking about my traveling and things I'd seen. I was talking mostly to Jenkins and Holdridge, because they had some China background.Neither one of them had spent any time in China to speak of, but at least they were so-called China specialists.

That was a mistake.I was supposed, I think, to talk only to Kissinger.Neither Holdridge nor Jenkins would say a word.They were almost embarrassed by my talking to them rather, than
directing my talk to Kissinger.

[484]

J. SERVICE:I changed.I got myself better oriented, shall we say.Kissinger asked me at one point, "Were the Chinese serious about Taiwan?"In other words, that they wouldn't have normalization of relations until we broke off with Taiwan.

I said, "Yes, they're absolutely serious."

He said, "You don't think they're bargaining?"

I said, "No, on this question they're not bargaining.It's a symbolic issue.They may be willing to accept some sort of a formula which would still not incorporate Taiwan, unified in the mainland, wholly.We have to recognize Chinese sovereignty, and that means we have to break off diplomatic relations with Taiwan."

I think Kissinger found this very hard to believe.He said, "Oh, my people are always telling me something different.They say they're like the Russians.This is bargaining."

I said, "No, this is not a bargaining point."

During this dialogue here I said something about Mao.He suddenly stopped and looked at me, sort of surprised, and he said, "Do you know Mao?"

I said, well yes, I knew him quite well.

Then the wheels went around for a little while, and a moment later he said, "Would you be willing to come to San Clemente?"Kissinger said, "When are you getting back to the States?"

I told him when it was.It was going to be somewhere before November 15.

He said, "Would you be willing to come to San Clemente?We're going to be out there about that time.We're going to be out at San Clemente for Thanksgiving."

I said, "Certainly.I'd be perfectly willing to come to San Clemente."He never mentioned the president's name, but it was obvious that coming to San Clemente, "We'll be there at Thanksgiving"--

I said, "Certainly."

Then he said, "As soon as you get back to Washington I want you to call my secretary and tell her where you can be reached and how we can get a hold of you anytime we want to."He said

[485]

J. SERVICE:this twice and saw me out the front door and again made a point of this business of calling his secretary.He said, "She'll know all about it.She'll be briefed.But, we want to know how to get in touch with you."

I agreed to do that, and [chuckling] nothing came of it.

Services Mobbed by the Press in Hong Kong

J. SERVICE:When I was in Peking the New York Times got hold of me and wanted me to write an article for their magazine.I agreed to do that.But I didn't try to write it in China.

When we came out and got to Hong Kong we were really unprepared--I wasn't prepared--for the terrific furor.I should have been.I should have been prepared really.There was a tremendous interest, you remember, at that period about Nixon's visit which was coming.Kissinger had just made his second trip to China.

When we got off the train in Hong Kong, we were simply swamped.Every newspaperman in Hong Kong seemed to be down at the railway station, firing questions, some of them friendly, some unfriendly.

The French news agency, Agence France Presse had a Chinese who wanted to bring up my old views, and did I still feel China was, you know, paradise, and so on and so on.At any rate, it was very hard to get away from these people.

The main thing, of course, was the Lin Piao affair.In China we heard nothing about Lin Piao.He obviously wasn't visible.There had been this rumor of a plane shot down.That was just before we went into China.All air traffic in China was stopped for a day or two.But, it hadn't yet been tied up in China with Lin Piao's being on the plane.

I had made various random inquiries in China, what had happened to Lin Piao, and was always put off."Important leaders often disappear for conferences," or something like that, or "Lin Piao's health has been bad; maybe he's not well."

Only one man had said, "Well, later on it will become apparent."I should have perhaps been better attuned to realize that this was some sort of an intimation that the true story wasn't being told.But, by and large, Lin Piao was simply a non subject.You couldn't find out.Nobody talked about him.

[486]

J. SERVICE: When I got to Hong Kong, just having come out from China, everyone expected me to have information about this business.All I could say was, "In China you don't hear anything; you don't know anything," which made me look like a bit of a fool.

The press club wanted me to come and have a session with them at their luncheon.I declined.I simply wasn't set or prepared for this.I wasn't really trying to make a big thing out of the whole thing.As far as I was concerned it was a personal trip, a sentimental journey, if you want to call it
that, rather than a news-gathering thing.

I did talk to the consul-general in Hong Kong, spent a day talking to him and to some of the people on the staff.I didn't ask and I wasn't told who they were.I had told the Chinese that I was going to talk to my government.And I had written out a summary.Right after we left Chou En-lai I borrowed a typewriter from the Adlers and had written out a summary of the talk.So, I had that.

LEVENSON:Back to old times.

J. SERVICE:Yes.Anyway, we just sort of holed up.I'd gotten in touch with Loren Fessler.He used to be with Time magazine and then was working for the Universities Field Service. He found us a room in a small hotel, a comfortable enough room, but not one of the tourist hotels.

We stayed there.Various people tracked us down.I talked to a Newsweek man, Sidney Liu. Several other people, NBC and ABC got a hold of me.I was on the [Frank] McGee show, the Today show.We got out of Hong Kong as fast as we could and came home.

LEVENSON:How did Hong Kong seem after China?

J. SERVICE:Oh, it was a terrible shock.It's depressing to come out of China and as soon as you get across the border you start seeing beggars, and filth, the crowded shacks, and all the development in the New Territories.The commercialism and the advertising and everything in Hong Kong is a cultural shock after you come out of China where we'd been for six weeks.

Plus the fact that we felt harried and pursued and unhappy.

The Oakland Tribune had a very enterprising woman that I'd met before I went to China.She called up long distance and interviewed me in the hotel.It was a pretty good piece in the Tribune, apparently was passed by old Senator [William] Knowland himself.He was still alive then.

[487]

LEVENSON: [laughing]That was a turnaround, wasn't it?

J. SERVICE:Yes. Incidentally, while we're thinking of it, the big turnaround really came with the announcement of the Nixon visit and the Fulbright hearing, because all the papers and all the magazines, the news magazines, wrote it up quite extensively, wrote up the Fulbright hearing and our interview afterward.

The coverage was astonishingly different in tone.Newsweek had been less antipathetic, less hostile than Time in the old days.But, even Time magazine just fell all over itself to be friendly.

I had promised an article for the New York Times Magazine.I wrote it when I got back and sent it in.They held it for a while and decided not to use it.

There were several things wrong.Partly I simply can't get away from writing State Department reports.Also I think I didn't draw conclusions--didn't do the analysis.I tried to say, "This is what we saw," and let the reader draw his own conclusions.

So they turned the thing down.Harrison Salisbury, whom I had had some contact with before, heard that the magazine section had turned it down.He called me and said that he'd seen it, would like to make some excerpts and use them in the Op. Ed. page.I said, "Go ahead."

So he did, and they ran I think for three days in the Op. Ed. page.

LEVENSON:Under your name?

J. SERVICE: Yes.One mistake I perhaps made was in not asking to check his excerpting.He cut out all the qualifying sections where I point out that, of course, the reader will know that it's a Communist country, that the Chinese don't have democratic freedoms as we know them in this country, that education, propaganda, and the press are all controlled, and things like that.

Well, those weren't interesting so far as Harrison Salisbury was concerned; so the published excerpts are more rosy perhaps than my full picture.It made me look a little bit like a starry-eyed apologist, I'm afraid.However, I can't worry too much about that.

[488]

A New Yorker Profile of Jack

J. SERVICE:About this time I got a letter from [E.J.] Kahn of the New Yorker, asking whether or not I would consent to be profiled.We had some debate as to whether it was a good idea or not.

LEVENSON:What were your reservations?

J. SERVICE: I didn't really have any reservations.It was other people, friends and Caroline, that had reservations.Certainly some of my friends here in Berkeley thought that I ought to insist on okaying the text.I didn't think we could put any real reservations on it.In other words I thought he had to be free to write whatever he wanted on the basis of what I said to him and what other people said, because his procedure is to interview a lot of people.It's not just interviewing the profilee.

It turned out that he became interested because his wife was the sister of a man named Don Munro, who was teaching at Michigan and who had spent a year at Berkeley just shortly before that He's in Chinese philosophy.

Through that connection, apparently, Kahn had gotten interested.I agreed.He was coming out to San Francisco for some alumni chore--he's a Harvard alumnus--alumni association meeting or something of this sort.He talked to me and Caroline and various other people and was going to talk to more people, but then because of the Nixon visit, they wanted him to hurry up.He wrote it in a great hurry.

I was in New York, I think on my way to an appearance--the BBC wanted me to come to London for a talk show they had--along with Harrison Salisbury and [Ray] Ludden.At any rate, I had to read the thing in a hurry.

LEVENSON:So he did allow you to look at it?

J. SERVICE: I did actually see the thing, which was just as well because it is an extremely complicated story, as anybody who has gotten this far will know by now.He had some factual errors which I was able to correct.Of course, a lot of the things he'd been told by other people--I wasn't able to really do much about that--some of them were things that I wouldn't necessarily have agreed with.But, if it was factually wrong, I'd try to correct it.

That was published in April, 1972.

[488a]

P R O FILES

FORESIGHT, NIGHTMARE, AND HINDSIGHT

"Both before and after his banishment from responsible governmental affairs, Service talked extensively with the highest Communist Chinese leaders, and during the Second World War he was one of a very few American diplomats whom MaoTse-tung and Chou En-lai knew well.The fact that this man, whom the future rulers of Peking grew to like and trust, was quiet, dignified, candid, compassionate, and that he represented the very best in America, could have been most helpful to our country."

"Among some of the crueler jabs at Service, in his years of limbo, was the allegation that he was somehow personally responsible for the deaths ofAmerican boys in the Korean war.The fact is that if he had been listened to, and the United States had taken a realistic view of China and its Communists, there might not have been any Korean war."

"Meanwhile, Stilwell's successor, General Wedemeyer, passed through Tokyo on his way home for consultation.He had a cordial chat with Service, in which he said that Service was being recommended for a medal awarded to civilians for exemplary work during the war.In Washington, Service later heard, Wedemeyer saw J. Edgar Hoover, and afterward there were no more cordial meetings and no further talk of a medal."

[Sketch] John Service

"As another friend of Service's has remarked, few men have been so mightily defamed by nasty people and so meagerly defended by nice ones."

"The rendezvous was arranged with typical Kissinger furtiveness, but nothing much came of it; Kissinger, unlike most senior members of the United States Senate, didn't seem to be aware
that Service had ever met Mao.

From a Profile of John Service, ex-Foreign Service officer andpolitical casualty,
by E J .Kahn, Jr.
Appearing this week in
The New Yorker.
Yes, The New Yorker.

[489]

Generally Low Level of Press and Public Information on China

J. SERVICE:Fulbright had wanted me to come back for another session after I'd been to China.I couldn't very well refuse, although I wasn't really seeking publicity or press.But I did agree to go.He had [Ray] Ludden at that time and also a man named Warren Cohen who's a professor of diplomatic history at Michigan State University.That was in February of '72.That wasn't much of a hearing actually.

LEVENSON:What was your policy on dealing with the flood of requests you must have had for speaking?

J. SERVICE:I turned most of them down.I turned all of them down that I could.I was getting two or three requests a day, lecture agencies, commencements at universities.But I simply didn't want to do it.I made several talks at university centers.I did it where there was some personal tie or personal obligation--I didn't want to talk to the World Affairs Council.Then they said, "Will you talk to the board?"So I said okay.Then it turned out to be a huge mob in a home of Madeleine Russell.

I got sucked into a press conference in Washington, much against my will and against my wishes.I didn't realize what was happening.My old friend Bob Barnett was in Washington, had retired from the State Department, had become Washington representative of the Asia Society.The Asia Society had always been a genteel, cultural organization, and a child of John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s, interested in Oriental art and culture.

Barnett had gotten in touch with me as soon as I came back, along with the Council of Foreign Relations, all sorts of people.I told him I wasn't looking for any platform, I had nothing to sell, I wasn't trying to do this sort of thing.

So, he said, "If you do come to Washington let me know and we'll just have a few people in my office, just people that are interested in the Asia Society, in my office."

I pictured a group of elderly worthies in an ordinary-sized office.Well, I had to go to Washington for this Fulbright thing, and was going on to London.So, I let him know.

He said, "Yes, we'll just have a few people in my office. It will be very informal."

[490]

J. SERVICE:I had told him I wasn't giving press conferences, so I thought he understood that. When I arrived at his office it turns out that he had an office about 40 feet square.At least fifty or sixty people crowded in there, all the newspaper people from Washington, top people, who were just getting ready, a lot of them, to accompany Nixon because it was just before Nixon was due to leave for China.

Anyway, it turned out to be an unpleasant, embarrassing sort of a thing, because I thought the thing was off the record and they thought it was on the record.A lot of them were skeptical about my views of China.

They were extremely put off by the fact that I couldn't give any inside story on Lin Piao.They said, "How could you have been in China while these things were going on?After all, you're supposed to be a great political reporter, observer," and so on and so on.A lot of these people, of course, had never been in China and didn't know how things are.

LEVENSON:What did this tell you about the state of public information in this country on China?

J. SERVICE:Obviously it was very poor, but then I couldn't have given them very much either. My information was also poor.But, I didn't go to China to find out what had happened to Lin Piao!

LEVENSON:No.What I'm trying to suggest is that they were not aware of the restrictions that --

J. SERVICE:Oh, no, of course not.Eric Sevareid was there, and he was very disappointed.As one man put it, "It's just as if the whole top floor of the Pentagon had been fired."How could this not be known?How could this not be the subject of everybody's comments?They couldn't understand how a closed society and disciplined party could maintain so effective a control of sensational and important news.

Foreign Service Association Luncheon Honors McCarthy Era Victims,January, 1973

J. SERVICE:At the end of '72, the Foreign Service Association invited me to come and address a lunch.My first impression was that this was to be in my honor alone, and I declined on that basis, because, after all, there were many other people who had been involved, lost their jobs, and suffered in one way or another.I didn't think that it was fitting or appropriate that anything be done simply to honor me.

[491]

J. SERVICE: They came back and said that their intention was to really honor the whole group, and that Barbara Tuchman would talk, and that they simply hoped that I would attend and say a few words, represent the group.They got from me the names of a lot of people who should be invited who were involved.

I agreed on that basis, and we went.The luncheon actually was January 30, 1973.Do you want to know about it?

LEVENSON: Yes. I know that it was reported in the New York Times and all over the place.

J. SERVICE:Oh yes, it was a big deal. A lot of people came.I was glad to see Adrian Fisher, who had been the legal adviser in the State Department at the time that I had my go-around.Also Averell Harriman.A lot of other people came.

LEVENSON:And your whole family came, didn't it?

J. SERVICE:The whole family was there, and a lot of people, old friends, Edmund Clubb.Arthur Ringwalt came up from Chapel Hill.Ludden would not go because he felt the Foreign Service Association never did anything for us, and so why should he go to "their party."

The association was rather timorous, back in 1950-51.After the reaction to their having given me an encouraging hand at a luncheon in 1950, they were attacked by McCarthy.Oh, that's too strong. They did publish editorials and gave their blessing to a defense fund.But as an association, they took no real stand on loyalty or security, or the obvious singling out of the China service.

There was a little bit of nastiness at the luncheon because of a man named Hemenway (Hemenway, not Hemingway) who passed around some fliers to every table, questions to ask Service about the Amerasia case, involvement in the Amerasia case.Some of the people who went to the luncheon did not rise and join in the standing applause at the end of my talk.I didn't see them.

J. SERVICE:[hands interviewer list of questions]Those are the questions that this fellow, Hemenway, rushed around and put on every table.

LEVENSON: What prompted him, in your opinion?

J. SERVICE:He's an extreme rightist, a bit of an eccentric, who really believes, I think, that the Foreign Service Association was making a mistake in having me.

[491a]

Some Questions for John Stewart Service

The American Foreign Service Association is honoring John Stewart Service at a luncheon at the Department of State on January 30, 1973.Mr. Service is to give a talk on the subject of "Integrity in Field Reporting."Mr. Harrop, Chairman of the Board of the Foreign Service Association, has stated that Mr. Service and other "Old China Hands" are to be honored because their reporting from China in the 1940's was honest and accurate, even though what they said was unpopular.However, Mr. Harrop admits that he has not studied Service's reports, nor is he aware of any systematic evaluation of them that would justify his judgment.

A number of Mr. Service's reports from China have been published in full in The Amerasia Papers, a two-volume report published by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1970.A perusal of this study prompts us to suggest the following list of questions that those attending the Service luncheon might appropriately ask.

1.John Leighton Stuart, our last ambassador to China on the mainland, wrote in his memoirs: "We Americans mainly saw the good things about the Chinese Communists, while not noticing carefully the intolerance, bigotry, deception, disregard for human life and other evils which seem to be inherent in any totalitarian system." A study of your reports from China reveals much praise of the Communists , but we were not able to find any criticism of them.Were you blind to their faults, as suggested by Ambassador Stuart?

2.Your colleague in China, John K. Emmerson, told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1957, that the American diplomats in China in the 1940's failed to "appreciate and understand the ultimate objectives of the Communist movement."Do you share that judgment?

3.In a report dated August 3, 1944, you said: "The Communists base their policy toward the Kuomintang on a real desire for democracy in China."Do you still feel that the Communists were sincere in their claim that they wanted democracy?

4.In a report dated Sept. 8, 1944, you suggested that the aims of the Japanese Communist Party were perhaps congruent with American aims and that the U. S. should consider giving the JCP "sympathetic support."Do you think that showed deep understanding of the objectives of the Japanese Communist Party?

5.In a report dated Sept. 28, 1944, you said: "The Communist political program is simple democracy.This is much more American than Soviet in form and spirit."When you wrote those words were you aware of the fact that on May 26, 1943, the Chinese Communist Party adopted a resolution reading: "The Chinese Communist Party is one of Marxian Leninism?Were you ignorant of the resolution, or did you simply equate Leninism with democracy?

6.In a report dated Sept. 28, 1944, you said:"The Chinese people are not yet ready for socialism and will not be for a long time to come.To talk of socialism now is impractical.The next stage in China's advance must be capitalism."This was represented as the view of the Chinese Communists.Did they (and you) really believe this, or was it merely a deception to win American support for the Communists?

7. In one of your reports you quoted Mao as saying:"The Communist Party has no intention whatsoever of overthrowing the rule of the Kuomintang. . .The Communist Party believes in multi -party rule...We have and will continue to stick to our promises.First, not to overthrow the Kuomintang.Second, not to confiscate land."Do you think that uncritical acceptance of such assurances was a factor in influencing the U. S. to try to force the nationalists to enter into a coalition government with the Conmunists?

8.In 1945, you admitted having given Philip Jaffe, editor of Amerasia, a number of highly classified reports.You justified this on the ground that they were your own reports.Is it your view that foreign service officers have a right to give classified material which they have produced to anyone they please?

Suggested by: CONCERNED VOTERS, P. 0. Box 34421, Washington, D. C. 20034

[492]

J. SERVICE:The speeches were broadcast.Another auditorium was filled with people that heard it piped in.Then it was broadcast by a local public television station I think.

That's a copy of my speech.This last part is about Sokobin.Sam was regarded in China as being a bit out of step, shall we say.He didn't belong to the club in a sense.He was in Tsingtao, and sent in reports, which were quite factual, about Japanese successes in exploiting raw materials from Shantung, coal, grain, and peanuts, and cotton--various things.

These reports were at variance with the line that the Chinese were putting out at that time.Some of the officers in the embassy in Peking accused Sam of being pro-Japanese and thought it was very smart to arrange his transfer to Kobe.He got to Kobe just in time to be interned, and he never after that returned to China.After the war he was in Birmingham, I think.

LEVENSON:Right, yes.So, his career was effectively destroyed too.

J. SERVICE:Yes.

LEVENSON:How good was his Chinese? I know he was a collector, but --

J. SERVICE:He did not have any great reputation as a Chinese scholar or linguist, but I think he kept up his Chinese better than most other people.He still reads fairly well.

LEVENSON:I wonder how many other people there are like that who never hit the headlines.

J. SERVICE:How does one know?There are plenty, or many, I'm sure.But, Sam was a bit of a misfit.He didn't fit the normal Foreign Service mold, as I said.He was one of the few Jews, and he [was] rather conspicuous.I don't think that we were intolerant.

J. SERVICE:You asked me last time how I felt, and I didn't really give a very good answer.Of course, I was tremendously pleased at being there.It was a strain.I was a little disappointed, because my talk was really over the heads of some of the audience.

I told the story of Marshall Green's projection about the New Zealand elections, that the Labour Party would win by four votes.The ambassador, Avra Warren, didn't want to accept it.

[493]

J. SERVICE:So, the first thing I was told to do when I got there was to read this report and give my opinion as to whether we ought to send it in to the Department.This very much annoyed Green, because I was brand new, had no background.This was something he'd worked on very hard, along with the help of a local New Zealand girl who worked on our staff.

Anyway, I read it and talked to Marshall about his sources, how he justified it.So, I said to the ambassador that I thought it was okay, let's send it in.And, of course, Labour won by four votes precisely.

The point of my bringing this up, which most of the audience didn't get, was that shortly before my talk there had been another general election in New Zealand, and the embassy had been caught flat-footed because they thought that National was going to win and Labour had won, a big upset victory.The ambassador was a political appointee.I thought that most of my Foreign Service audience would catch the point I was trying to make, of this political appointee down there.They didn't.They laughed about my reference to Marshall Green, but that was all.

Poor old [Loy] Henderson, as I think Caroline has probably said, was very nervous that there would be a question period afterward, and I might be embarrassed.But the people running the affair didn't allow any questions.No one got a chance.There was standing applause, and then everyone disbanded.

LEVENSON: It must have been a jubilant occasion for you, wasn't it, in spite of the disturbances. What were you thinking at the time?

J. SERVICE:Actually I was trying to keep control of my emotions most of the time.You know, I'm an emotional person, and it was a very difficult business simply to keep control.

LEVENSON:Do you think that's a good place to pause?

Consultant on Sino-American Relations and China:Some Fan Mail
[Interview 14: November 14, 1977]

LEVENSON: In going through some of the files, I wanted to ask you how much time do you spend --apart from preparing for this memoir--in looking over your documents and files?Do you often have recourse to them?

J. SERVICE:Oh, at various times.But, I don't do it habitually.[laughter]

[494]

J. SERVICE:I've almost always been willing to talk to people.I've gotten a lot of letters from people, scholars writing a Ph.D. dissertation, or an honors paper or this or that.

Sometimes I've gotten trapped into a long, involved correspondence with somebody who has no background.Very often they're in something like diplomatic history, knowing nothing about China or the context.So, after several experiences of writing a man's book for him, I have said, "Look, if you come to California, come to Berkeley, I'll be glad to talk to you."

I've talked to--I don t know; I've lost track of how many--but I suppose fifty people over the years. One man was writing about John Carter Vincent; another was writing about Ambassador Gauss. There have been a lot of people writing about the Dixie Mission and so on.Sometimes that's required me to go back to my files or see what I could find that's relevant.It's hard to put any estimate on how much time I've spent on it.

It's been substantial, sure.Then, of course, I talked to E.J. Kahn [of the New Yorker ].That was a fairly extensive, in-depth interview.I did some refreshing of my memory.Just doing my monograph required me to do some.

LEVENSON:What about Barbara Tuchman?

J. SERVICE:Barbara was more interested in what I remembered of Stilwell.She was looking for personal things, color, incidents, anecdotes, that sort of thing.I don't remember that I went into the file very much for her.She had the War Department histories, the three volumes on the CBI theater.Of course, she had the Stilwell papers down in Stanford, and she talked to the family.So that in my case she wasn't really using me as a factual source, a research source, so much as just embroidery.

LEVENSON:Would you comment on some of the books that have been written about you?

J. SERVICE:Oh, goodness.First, I've got to try to think of all the books that have been written, and that's quite a job.There was [David] Halberstam's book, The Best and the Brightest. Halberstam talked to me, not a great deal.He was interested more in Vietnam than China.

A lot of people have written books about the period without talking to me, people like Brian Crozier who recently published a book on Chiang Kai-shek, The Man Who Lost China.He pretty much accepted the Kuomintang line.He had a collaborator on the book who was a Chinese newspaperman in Taiwan.

[495]

LEVENSON:Perhaps we should re-emphasize that the book is about Chiang Kai-shek because I was under a misunderstanding.I thought that the title referred to you! [laughter]

J. SERVICE:No.Crozier was trying to catch a market.It was just after Chiang died, and he claims this to be the first complete biography of Chiang Kai-shek.It was the first one published after Chiang died, so he was able to say that.

There are a lot of books written about the period that are friendly, and use my reports that were written without any consultation with me.A man named Carsun Chang (Carsun Chang, The Third Force in China (New York: Bookman Associates, 1952)) , who was a leader of one of the third parties in China, cited one of my reports on the Kuomintang of which excerpts were published in the White Paper.He used that very early--in 1952.

A lot of people that have written books on the period have cited my reports from published sources, U.S. Foreign Relations or from the White Paper.Rupert Emerson, of Harvard, did one.Warren Cohen, who's in diplomatic history, America's Response to China, used quite a bit of my stuff.So that I've gotten accustomed to seeing myself in a footnote, particularly after my Amerasia Papers came out.That's now a footnote in a lot of things.

Most of the people that talked to me were not writing books directly on me.Or they were writing papers that didn't get published, term papers, seminar papers.

Generally, they ask me if I want to have a copy sent to me.I feel they will be more free if they're not, you know, thinking, "Well now, what's Service going to think of this?"I usually say, "No, don't send me a copy."But, sometimes they do.

You want to turn that off?I can get you one or two that people have sent me, I think.[tape off]

LEVENSON:How do you feel that you've been represented in print in recent years?I'm speaking now of friendly journalists and serious academic people.

J. SERVICE:Kahn's New Yorker profile was excessively friendly.It's not really a profile, it's a sort of a celebration.Most of them have been very fair.I don't think there's any real criticism about them.Some of them, I think, have been annoying, particularly this Crozier book.But then Crozier's got a long history of association with the CIA.

[496]

LEVENSON:He was on The Economist staff, wasn't he, for a number of years?

J. SERVICE:Yes.But, he's got some silly mistakes.

Then, there are various other things that have come in.There's been a biography of Dean Acheson recently that has got some factual errors or misleading statements in it.But, I don't rush off and do battle now.I think they're not meant to be unfriendly.The man just is ignorant, that's all.

LEVENSON:Do you still receive crank mail?

J. SERVICE:We haven't now for a long time.We still get people who want to find some way of just meeting me or talking to me, fan mail now rather than crank mail, I'd say.

LEVENSON:Does this bother you at all?

J. SERVICE: [laughing]Well, sometimes it's perplexing.We had a call recently from some Chinese woman who had come up from Los Angeles.Her son was a student here.She wanted to meet me and talk to me, she admired my work so much.Somehow it just seemed a bit fishy, but I just said, "I'm sorry, but it's not convenient.I don't go to the office.I'm retired."I didn't encourage her.

People want to talk to you about things that seem quite unrelated really.Some woman was making a study of people who have been through crises in their life and how they handle a crisis, how they react, you know, this sort of thing.

LEVENSON:Did you talk with her?

J. SERVICE:Yes.

LEVENSON:Didn't you mention that somebody just came and rang the doorbell once?

J. SERVICE: Yes, we had somebody ring the doorbell a few months ago.It was a woman whose son is a student here at Berkeley, and she was in Berkeley.

We get letters occasionally from someone who has read, generally it's China Hands, and they feel impelled to write a friendly note.

LEVENSON:That's nice.

J. SERVICE:Yes.

[497]

A Retrospective:Effects on the Family, Finances

LEVENSON:How interested are your children in all of this?

J. SERVICE:I don't think very interested actually.[laughter]

They were interested in The China Hands.Kahn talked to them, asked them about their reactions. Apparently Ginny talked to him fairly frankly.She'd had some sort of a nervous breakdown when she was at Oberlin.I'm not sure whether she attributed this to the effects of the case or not.I'm not sure just what she said.I was a little worried that Kahn had it in the galleys of his book.He said he got it from her and she had mentioned it.I'm not sure whether he took it out or not, whether it's in the book.[Not in the book. Ed]

When Bob decided he wanted to go into the Foreign Service I was rather anxious, rather concerned, that he might be going into the Foreign Service out of some feeling that he had to justify the family name, remove the blot on the escutcheon, or something like that.

He was very sure that this was not his motive for going into the Foreign Service.He'd lived in the Foreign Service, he was sure that he was going to find it interesting, and liked the life.But, apparently when he talked to Kahn he did say that this was a factor.

I objected to this in Kahn's book, and Kahn said, "Well, after all, this is what he said."But, I wasn't there, so I don't know how it fitted into the context of the conversation.I assume what Bob said was that, yes probably this was one factor in going into it, but I'm sure it wasn't, at least I have always been quite sure it wasn't the real reason why he went into the Foreign Service.

LEVENSON:Did you ask Bob after the book was published about it?

J. SERVICE: I don't think I ever have, no.No.I think it's rather healthy that they don't dwell on this business.We have a friend--I might as well mention her name, Mrs. [Betty] Vincent--whose life has been blighted by an obsession over the injustice done to her husband [John Carter Vincent], the ruin of their lives and so on.She doesn't talk of the ruin of her life; she talks of the ruin of John Carter's life and career.But, obviously she's very close to it, so, it affected her life too.I think it's much better for the children not to brood or feel particularly strongly about these things, or not let it get to them.

[498]

J. SERVICE: Of course, Philip was so small that--He says he didn't really know much about this till he read The China Hands, the Kahn book.

LEVENSON:What about the effect on Caroline?

J. SERVICE: This is very hard to say.Caroline, I think, has been made more nervous perhaps than she otherwise would have been, nervous about publicity.She shies away from getting into the press, believes it is apt to bring some sort of repercussion, some sort of backlash, cause something bad to happen.I think that, generally speaking, she would prefer not to have had the publicity of the Kahn article.She feels badly about some of the things, my frankness to Kahn, and self-conscious about some of the things that I told Kahn.

There's an impression that I became a wealthy man as a result of my steam trap episode.Actually, we didn't.Three hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money for stocks that had cost me five thousand dollars, admittedly.But, by the time we paid considerable sums to the various lawyers involved--After all I'd had to pay the lawyers who had brought the lawsuit to protect my stock. Then when I had money in hand I had to pay something to Rhetts and to the people who had helped him in the Supreme Court.Then we had to pay the lawyers for the Court of Claims business. Roughly one-fourth of the money that I got went to lawyers.One-fourth of it went to Uncle Sam as capital gains tax.I was left with one-half.

A few thousand of it we gave away to various people. [We] gave some money to the man that worked with me on the trap [Midgette].I felt he'd never gotten what he should have out of the company, out of Sarco.He got something but not very much.Some people had given us money.We tried to repay them where we could.We gave a little money to the children.So, we weren't exactly well off.

LEVENSON:Right.

J. SERVICE:But, things like that bother Caroline a lot.Generally the whole idea of public attention bothers her more than it perhaps would have otherwise.She is a more cautious person than I.I generally minimize the risks and dangers [laughter], and she is perhaps more realistic than I am.

As I said before, Caroline quite sensibly didn't get herself involved in the details.She just decided she had to let the lawyers and me grapple with all the day-to-day minutia.Things like the Val Chao business, she doesn't remember now that it did

[499]

J. SERVICE:appear, after all, in the Congressional Record, [that] it was mentioned in the Washington Post.Maybe she didn't know at the time.I can't be sure.I just assumed she knew at the time.Very possibly she didn't.

LEVENSON:Were you aware at the time of her confrontations with [Hiram] Bingham and David Lawrence?

J. SERVICE:We knew of it after.We didn't know about it beforehand.She didn't tell us she was going to do it, as I recall. It annoyed the lawyers.Rhetts didn't think it was good to have people running around and--It was something that he wasn't in control of and he didn't think it would help us any or do any good.So, I think he was a little annoyed.

I felt myself, "Well, no harm done.Why not?" Actually, as I say, I only knew of it after the event, so I couldn't have stopped it anyway.

LEVENSON:Do you have anything else to say on this general matter of the family and the effects of such a long drawn out affair?After all, what was it?Twelve years from Amerasia to the Supreme Court.

J. SERVICE: I don't know, Rosemary. There isn't very much to say about it.It's just something we had to get through, that was all.I think, all things considered, we came out of it well.It might have been much worse, as far as the effect on the family goes.

On Virginia I'm not sure.There's so many factors involved.I think that probably my being in China and away from the family for almost six years was harder on the family, Caroline and me, and on the children perhaps than the Amerasia case or the firing.As I say, you can't just pinpoint it on the case.The life we led, the long separation, and my emotional involvement in China, all these things affected the family.

I said at the very beginning, when we first started, that there is in some sense a repetition of my own parents situation, my father devoting himself to the interests of the YMCA and to China over the interests of the family, his staying out in China when he really should have come home on home leave.They were out ten years.I think that my mother paid a price for that.

But, on the whole, we've survived, I don't have any more philosophical remarks.[laughter]

[500]

Formal Retirement from Center:Collaborates on the Center's Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese Terms

J. SERVICE:In March, '73 I retired from the center.They gave a very nice dinner down at a Chinese restaurant.You were probably there, weren't you.

LEVENSON:I was, yes.

J. SERVICE:It was not a good evening.I was not in a very good mood; I'm afraid I was very ungracious.

LEVENSON:I don't recall that.

J. SERVICE:Oh yes, I was not at my best.I was annoyed because they had gotten a lot of outside people in, which I felt was unfair.They had obviously talked to Caroline and found out who our friends were outside of the center and invited them to come and pay their way.I didn't think that was good.It made a nice, big party and I'm sure a lot of people were glad to be there, but--

LEVENSON:Oh, I think everybody was glad to be there, without exception.

J. SERVICE:It was not, I thought, right.

We then took a long trip to Europe, a wonderful trip, but we don't need to talk about that.

The center had been fiddling for years with a Chinese dictionary of contemporary terms.Mr. [Wen-shun] Chi had had this project going, but it wasn't getting anywhere.Nothing was really being done.He didn't seem able to pull it together and get it into publishable form.

I had always resisted getting involved.I had other things to do.But that fall when I got back from Europe, Stanford put out a dictionary of new terms which was terrible-- absolutely unusable.I then decided I would cooperate, help get the center's out.That turned out to be much more of a project than I expected.

LEVENSON:And it is just published.

J. SERVICE:It's just been published, July, '77.It took us almost four years, much longer than we expected.

LEVENSON: Where was it printed?

[501]

J. SERVICE:It was set in type in Hong Kong but printed in the United States.Actually it's all on film now.They send that to the States and print it in the States.

We first tried Korea.They asked for bids from various people.Japan now is very expensive. South Korea was the cheapest.But they simply couldn't do a satisfactory job.We sent them manuscript by stages.As we had one section finished we sent it off.The Korean people simply were making too many errors.So we changed to Hong Kong, and they did an excellent job.

LEVENSON:I think you told me that they even corrected some mistakes?

J. SERVICE:Oh yes, they found our mistakes and corrected them!There were notes from the typesetter, "Shouldn't this be so and so?"Of course, there are still errors in it.

LEVENSON:Was the manuscript all handwritten?

J. SERVICE:The characters are handwritten, yes.We don't have any Chinese typewriter.It would be very difficult because we're using the new, simplified characters.This was where we made some of the errors.The man in Hong Kong was very good at picking out errors, although their font was not quite the latest font.We had some trouble because characters have been changing, eliminating one stroke here or there.Since our index was based on numbers of strokes, I had to be sure we got exactly the same form.

LEVENSON:Have you had any feedback from China on it yet?

J. SERVICE:[laughing]I was in Washington recently and called at the liaison office and gave them a copy.My friend there, Mr. [Chi-mei] Hsieh, who has the same Chinese surname that I have, is a Counselor for Cultural Affairs.I apologized, in the Chinese way, for the many mistakes and hoped they will help correct them and so on.

He gave me rather a sardonic look, and he said, "Yes, we've found some." [laughter]

LEVENSON:Did he give you an errata list?

J. SERVICE:No, we didn't go that far.

[502]

Jack's War-Time Despatches Published.Lost Chance in China... Edited by Joseph W. Esherick

J. SERVICE:In 1972, I got a call from Random House.I think this was probably just after the profile was published in the New Yorker.They wanted me to put together my reports from China. I said I didn't think it could be done successfully, that the reports were too episodic and a lot of them were repetitious.I didn't think there was enough there really to make a book.

I think the idea had come from Orville Schell.I don't know.Because they had published a book by Orville and Joe Esherick on modern China, sort of a high school textbook.At any rate, they came back after a while and asked whether I would be willing to have a scholar, a historian, look at my reports and see if he could do something.I said, "Well sure."After all, it would be no work on my part.So, why should I refuse?They came up with Joe Esherick and I was delighted.I had known Joe when he was getting his Ph.D. here.

So, Joe did it and produced Lost Chance in China.I think he did an excellent job.

By this time, of course, a great many of my reports had been published in the State Department volumes, U.S. Foreign Relations, my reports or parts of my reports.I had some.John Fairbank had some.Some came from the Lauchlin Currie files.

Kubek's The Amerasia Papers had published a lot of my reports.Then we got many more out of the State Department.Esherick was consulting me and using clues from The Amerasia Papers or from U.S. Foreign Relations.We got dates and despatch numbers to transmit .

The State Department cooperated very nicely.They dug up almost everything that we wanted. Even some of the things that they couldn't find but they said might be in my security file, sure enough, Joe wrote and got them from the security file.I'm not sure why some of them had been in the security files.Probably they were documents that we had used or submitted as evidence in my hearings, some of them.

Anyway, we got most of what we wanted.There are a few things that are missing.They said we could go to Washington and search the files ourselves, but neither Joe nor I had time or wanted to do that.Joe turned out to have far more than

[503]

J. SERVICE:enough for a book.His first draft came out to something like 750 pages.Random House said, "You're going to have to cut this down."So he did.

A very nice thing that Joe did was to suggest that the royalties be split since the reports themselves were mine.So, actually I made a little money out of it.

It was the most painless book that has ever been written.Unfortunately I usually get all the credit for it.It's considered my book, although he's the man that did it.

One little embarrassment is the dedication which he put in, which I didn't know about, "to those who chose honesty."[chuckling]A lot of my Foreign Service friends think that it's my dedication and that I'm sort of pointing a finger at other people, which I'm not.

I don't think anyone else has taken the reports they wrote and made a book out of them without rewriting or revising or bringing them up to date.

Edmund Clubb has had one report published—it's a very small book--a report that he wrote on the Communists when he was in Hangkow.This was when they were still in Kansu, in 1932 I think (01iver Edmund Clubb, Communism in China, as reported from Hangkow in 1932.New York, Columbia University Press, 1968). That's been published, but otherwise I don't know of any report that basically is simply reprinting reports that are thirty years old.

LEVENSON:That's remarkable .

J. SERVICE:One thing that contributed to making it possible was the fact that I was fired and cut off all connection with the State Department, so that I never had a need to hedge or revise my views.People who stayed in the State Department, who were not fired, had to join the team.Their views, in most cases, changed during the years of estrangement with China.It would be rather embarrassing perhaps for their reports to be published.But, in my case, I can stand on what I wrote back in 1944.

LEVENSON: Is there anything in the despatches that you regret or feel was wrong?

[504]

J. SERVICE: I wasn't a hundred percent right, certainly not.We didn't foresee everything that was going to happen.We didn't foresee the rapidity of developments in China in the late 40's.We took too much at face value some of the things the Communists were saying.I think we didn't realize that they were stalling and playing for time, in much the same way the Kuomintang was.It just happened that they strengthened themselves by expanding and taking more territory when they could. They weren't really fighting as wholehearted a war against the Japanese perhaps as we thought, things like that.

They were talking of the socialization process in China taking decades.When the Communists got into power, they did it in a very few years. I don't think that I have to feel badly or regretful that I didn't foresee all those things. The general direction was correct.I wouldn't have published them if I felt badly about them.

LEVENSON: What about the word that caused you so much trouble, the "democratic Chinese Communists?"

J. SERVICE:You know, we weren't writing political science papers.People like Tang Tsou have written articles and made a lot about our folly in talking about the Communists being democratic. Yes, we were careless.We didn't think we were writing for anyone except the man on the China desk in the Department of State.We were using the language and terms that were being bandied about at the time.

If you read the reports themselves I pretty much explain what I mean by being democratic, giving the people at least a sense that they had a voice in what was going on, a real feeling, in their local affairs.These are difficult issues to grapple with and pin down.We're still having trouble.

The Chinese model of Communism is certainly very different from the Russian.Even critics will agree that people do have more say about things that affect them directly than they have in the Soviet Union.That's democratic in our sense.If you insist on defining democracy as having two parties competing against each other and things like that, it's not democratic.

The fall of the Gang of Four is, in a sense, a working out of popular will in China.Chou En-lai was very popular, and there was great resentment at the Gang of Four's treatment of him after he died.The demonstration on Tian-an Men Square was in a sense a democratic gesture, a popular gesture.

[505]

J. SERVICE:I regret certainly that we weren't more specific or more careful in using [chuckling] these terms.But, it's not all that simple.

LEVENSON:No.

J. SERVICE:Of course, the problem is that people simply say, "Oh, Service said they were democratic."They don't read my report, which may be ten or fifteen pages long describing what their policies were.

But, this is, you know, part of my whole feeling about China now.It's disappointing that some of the things that we saw in Yenan have become bureaucratized and the party has become much more totalitarian than it was in those days.The regime is a heavy-handed regime in many ways. We can't even argue that people enjoy the same kind of civil rights that we would like to have them enjoy.

LEVENSON:How was the book received, Lost Chance [in China]?

J. SERVICE:Oh, extremely well.It was well reviewed in almost every magazine except Esquire magazine, whose review was by Malcolm Muggeridge, who is a well known anti-Communist.

LEVENSON:Editor of Punch for many years.

J. SERVICE:Yes.He ridiculed the book in a very brief, two-sentence review.But, most of the other reviews were very friendly.The New York Times gave it a prominent review by Harrison Salisbury.Also they carried it on the page where they have the bestseller list, and have their editor's recommendations.We were listed for three weeks in that recommended category.It's been reviewed very widely over the country.

Our time had come.It was a sort of a swing back of the pendulum.As I said before, the Nixon visit to China, which was announced just before my testimony before the Fulbright committee, marked the big watershed, although before that my Amerasia Papers had gotten a few friendly reviews.

LEVENSON:Joe Esherick concludes Lost Chance with a statement that if the policies that you and your colleagues recommended had been followed, it's possible that the Korean and Vietnamese wars would not have occurred, but it was necessary for them to have occurred in a sense to prove that you and your colleagues were right.That's a rough and I hope fair summary of what he says.

J. SERVICE:Well, I can't disagree.I think there's logic in it, yes.Certainly, we would never have been recognized as having been right if none of these other events hadn't happened since then.

[506]

J. SERVICE: The Halberstam book is a little wrong.Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest argues that if we had remained in the State Department, if we had not been fired, that the Vietnam War would not have happened.This is, I think, more questionable than Esherick's statement, because if we had stayed in the Department, as I said before, our views would have had to become those of the Department.We would have had to change our views.

About this time I was asked to review a book by a Russian who was in Yenan while I was there, a man named [P.P.] Vladimirov, who was there ostensibly representing Tass, but he'd been sent then as a representative of the Comintern.These journals were published in Russian and then they tried to sell them to an American publisher.Doubleday asked me to read it (Petr Parfenovich Vladimirov, China's Special Area, 1942-1945, Bombay-Allied Publishers, 1974, and Doubleday, 1975).

I wrote them a critique pointing out that I thought that things had been added to the journal-- undoubtedly the man had a journal and basically it was material from his journal--but that things had been added.

One of the ironic things is that the journals pay a great deal of attention to my presence in Yenan and talks with Mao Tse-tung.Vladimirov does me the honor of calling me "the most dangerous American in Yenan," because I was encouraging Mao Tse-tung in his nationalist tendencies.It would have been very nice, of course, to have had this for the loyalty hearings.

It points up a fact that we simply couldn't convince anybody of in the '50's.John Davies, as well as myself, said our whole approach to the situation in China was basically an anti-Soviet one.We were prematurely anti-Soviet.It wasn't the fashion in those days.But, we were concerned about the postwar situation, and the desirability of trying to put a wedge between the Chinese Communists and the Russians to separate them if we could, which we thought was possible.

Three Months in China in 1975

J. SERVICE:By 1975 we thought we'd like to go back to China.The Chinese had kept mentioning the subject, you know, "Why don't you come back?" every time I saw them.We were in Washington for another set of Fulbright hearings on the future of American foreign

[507]

J. SERVICE:policy.I gave a very strong statement on why we should normalize relations with China.Fulbright was interested, but he felt that my views were a little too extreme, that the American public would react in favor of Taiwan.He was right.Anyway, we had lunch at the liaison office, and they came back to the same idea, "Why don't you come to China again?"

I said, "It's a long way to go and it costs a lot of money, and I don't want to go just for a two or three week trip."

So, they said, "Well, what's in your mind?"

I said, "I'd like to stay at least three months."

They were rather surprised.It took some time to get approval, but it did go through.

We said we only wanted to stay in Peking.We wanted to stay in the little hotel, an old, converted Chinese residence, where our friends the Adlers live.So we got to Peking, and we were met at the plane by several of our old friends, including the Adlers and George Hatem, the American doctor. We just settled in and had a lovely month in Peking at the Peace Hotel.

LEVENSON:What did you do when you were in Peking?Did you feel that you were under surveillance?

J . SERVICE: No.We had a really wonderful woman assigned to us, a graduate of Tsing Hua University, who had majored in American literature.Her English was very good.She was not normally a guide or interpreter .

She came around every morning.I had said that I wanted to brush up my Chinese, so that she was assigned partly for that purpose.I read the papers, and I'd discuss with her the editorials or an article, something like that, and read various other things she recommended.I read several plays and a novel.

We'd have an hour session and then sometimes we had something scheduled.Once or twice a week we would go to a school or have an excursion of some sort.Sometimes she and Caroline would go out shopping.But most of the day was free.

I would generally go out for a walk or bicycle--I was going to buy a bicycle, then it turned out that Mrs. Adler had a bicycle which she wasn't using.

LEVENSON:Did you go out very early in the morning?

[508]

J. SERVICE:Sometimes.It depended.I went our early sometimes just to watch the people in the parks doing their exercises, their Tai Ch'iand joggers, all sorts of groups going out in the early morning.

Sometimes I went out in the middle of the day to various parks.I visited all the parks in Peking.I went around the old line of the city wall.I explored Peking probably more on this visit than I ever did when I lived there, because I went systematically each day to a different part of the city.

LEVENSON: Did you ever have any trouble photographing?

J. SERVICE: Occasionally, yes.If I was in an old or shabby area.Two or three times somebody would come up and say, "What are you doing?"

It was soon after the controversial Antonioni film on China had been released, and there had been a lot of hullabaloo in China about Antonioni because he was supposedly unsympathetic, unfriendly to China.It was supposed to be a Russian-inspired attack on China.It was the period when the Gang of Four was fairly powerful and there was a certain amount of xenophobia and concern about spies.

If someone objected, I would desist.If they didn't want me to take pictures I didn't insist on taking them.There was never any trouble.I never got arrested or anything like that.By and large, I just wandered free as the breeze.I was quite sure I was not under surveillance.I got a lot of pictures of Peking, and even some that showed old shabby buildings for that matter.

Then they said, "Well surely you want to travel some?"

So we said, "Yes, we would like to do some traveling.Where could we go?" I told them we would very much want to go up the Yangtze by steamer, because I'd done it as a boy many times.

Some visitors had made the trip down the river, but no one as far as we knew, no foreigners, had gone up the river.I said, "Well, boats come down; they've got to go up."It's much slower going up.You don't whisk through the gorges in such a rush.Anyway, they arranged it and we made the trip.

LEVENSON:I've seen your slides of the trip up the Yangtze, It looked marvelous.

J. SERVICE:We were lucky.We had a perfect day going through the gorges.It was very clear and sunny.We started going through the gorges before dawn, and ended just about dark, so it was a full day.

[509]

J. SERVICE: We were on the boat four days from Hangkow to Chungking. They gave us deluxe accommodations . We had our own saloon and deck and so on. It was all very nice.

We saw Yunnan again, our old haunts where Caroline first started out in China.

LEVENSON: Do you ever wish to go back to China to live?

J. SERVICE: Oh yes, I would like to go back.

LEVENSON: And live there?

J. SERVICE: Well, I'm not so sure of living.Certainly to visit and travel.It's much easier to get back and forth now.

I think the people that have settled there are quite happy, people like Alley and Hatem. They lead a special sort of life, though it's not like the foreigners in the old days. The attitude is very different, of course.Perhaps I could do something useful there, editing or something.

Jack's Report Published by the Sacramento Bee

J. SERVICE: We came back in '75. I was rather anxious to get something published, partly because people kept asking, "Aren't you going to write something?"

Atlantic Monthly was interested. They have a section in the front of the magazine, "Atlantic Reports."This is what I was thinking of. The editor wrote me and said he wanted me to plan on that.But he, apparently, was already thinking of publishing a chapter of a book by Ross Terrill.

He really wanted me to concentrate on Yunnan. Well, I wasn't particularly interested in concentrating on Yunnan.He thought that would be an area that not many people visited and maybe I could make my article about that.

I didn't take him very seriously, so I just wrote my general article.He kept it for a long time but then decided that it was too similar in some ways to the chapter he was going to publish from Ross Terrill's forthcoming book.It's true Ross Terrill and I see things in very much the same way, and our approach is quite similar.

[510]

J. SERVICE:Then I sent it to The New Yorker.Orville Schell had been in China when we were, and he was writing a book which The New Yorker was interested in. But he wasn't anywhere near finishing it, so he had no objection to my sending in a "Letter from Peking" sort of thing.

They kept it for a long time, but by that time [President Gerald] Ford was going to China.Joseph Kraft who has apparently got some sort of an in with The New Yorker--he's written for them before--apparently knew that he was going to go with Ford.So they turned my thing down, and it was finally published in the Sacramento Bee.They gave it a big spread, but of course not many people saw it because not many people see the Bee papers.

LEVENSON: That's a shame.

J. SERVICE:But I think it was a much better article than the one Kraft wrote.Kraft had only a few days in China with Ford.My article reflected what I was told in China by old friends like the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ch'iao Kuan-hua, my old friend, you remember, that I had offered blood to during the war.He had us to dinner in what used to be the American embassy in Peking. It's been fixed up recently and made into a government guest house.

He told me that Teng Hsiao-ping was going to take over when Chou died, be the premier.Naturally I reported all this.Very soon after the McClatchy papers printed it, I was proved wrong, because Teng Hsiao-ping was pushed out by the Gang of Four right after Chou En-lai died.

So once again my reputation for being a political reporter took a beating!

Preconceptions and Prejudices about China

LEVENSON:This is somewhat truistic, but do you think people see what they expect to see in China?

J. SERVICE:Oh, of course.This is very definitely true.I've seen some people go to China, I could tell before they went what they were going to write.They've got preconceptions.

LEVENSON:How do you try to counter this in yourself?

[511]

J. SERVICE:Well, in the first place, I probably wouldn't agree that I had preconceptions, would I? Most people don't.I don't know.I just think that I'm trained to be a little more skeptical perhaps.

What so many people who go to China lack, of course, is a background of what China used to be. Therefore, they believe a lot of things that are told them about the old China, which are exaggerated and not true.

To take an obvious example.We went to Yenan in 1971.There's a historical museum there, quite an important, large one.We went through, and they have guides that take you and give you a spiel, explain all the exhibits and so on.It was a young man that was taking us through.

Although it was after Lin Piao's fall, the museum hadn't yet gotten the word.Lin Piao was still Mao's designated heir, and the whole exhibit was centered around him.People like Chu Teh had disappeared, and Chou En-lai appeared, but not importantly.P'eng Teh-huai, who had been number two in the army, the vice deputy commander, just wasn't there at all.

I knew the truth.I knew what really was the situation, so that I was prepared for this sort of thing. But someone who hadn't had any history could have been misled.

When I came out I spoke to our own interpreter, a man that traveled with me who was from the foreign office.I said, "It was very interesting.But, when I was in Yenan there were always two pictures in every public room, two pictures of equal size, side by side, Chu Teh and Mao Tse-tung." He knew exactly what I meant, of course.

He said, "Chu Teh is very old now, and Lin Piao is now very important and the public has to be educated," and so on.

My background, shall we say, helped me to not be swept off my feet entirely.I think generally speaking I tend to be a little skeptical.At the same time I've got to agree that my prejudices, my sympathies, tend to be with China.I tend to find an explanation or perhaps an excuse for things.

A lot of the things that strike people that go to China as denial of personal liberties and so on, I can see in a historical context, that after all there never was much individualism in China anyway.They never valued individualism as we did.The clan system was very strong.The five Confucian relationships subordinated women to men, junior to senior, younger brother to older brother, and so on.So that the average Chinese doesn't miss any individual rights which he never knew, never enjoyed.

[512]

J. SERVICE:This may be my prejudice.Somebody like William Buckley, of course, who talked here recently, would say that this indicates soft-headedness or a great prejudice on my part.Maybe it does.I think Caroline's and my reactions to China are somewhat different, partly because she didn't really know the old China well.She had superficial impressions of it, and she didn't like old China very much.She went back this time on a very different basis, where people were friendly and she had much more contact with Chinese, and she saw the good side.

I think I was a little more reserved, although on the whole my reactions were very good, my impressions were good.It was different for me, from what I'd known in Yenan in 1944 and '45. China has become bureaucratized , and the people that I knew so well and so informally are now much less accessible .

Even talking to Chou En-lai, although he was very friendly and very kind in many ways, talking to a man who has been the head of state, the premier for twenty years, is a lot different from talking to a man in a cave in Yenan who's not yet held any real government position at all.It's bound to be very different.

The general atmosphere of secrecy in China now is very different from what it used to be.They won't even tell you, you know, when you're going to see somebody.When we actually did see Chou En-lai, I was having an interview out at Peking University and got a sudden phone call in the middle of the interview, "Come quick!"

My interpreter said, "We really have to go."He wasn't even going to let us finish up what we were talking about."We have to go right now!"

So, we had to rush down.I assumed we were going to see Chou En-lai, but we weren't told that. But all this, of course, is very different from what I remember of China.

People like Jack Belden were quite put off by the lack of openness.You can't really talk to anybody frankly or freely. It was easier in '75 than it was in '71.But by and large everyone tells you the same thing.No one can really say anything except the man at the top.

[513]

1976:A Heavy Speaking Schedule and a Heart Attack

J. SERVICE:I don't think there's very much more to say.We'd come back from China on our '75 trip.For some reason I felt now that I'd retired and I'd had the long trip to China, I wanted to be more available for giving talks.I agreed to give quite a number of talks at various places.

The U.S. China Friendship Association had me give a keynote talk at their annual conference in '75, when we got back.I did a lot of talking around the San Francisco Bay Area.I was asked to go to a number of universities to give speeches.

I think it was a number of factors, but in July '76 I suddenly had a heart attack, which seemed to be caused mainly by stress.There were no other factors that we could pinpoint.I did smoke rather heavily, but all the other factors were low, low blood pressure, low weight, low cholesterol.

I think it was some feeling of stress over all these various commitments I'd made. I find it difficult to write speeches or prepare speeches.I do much better in seminar discussions.In fact most of what I did when I came back in '71 was going around to different universities where I talked to Far Eastern specialist groups informally, basically just answering questions.I like that better than speeches.

There's not much to say about the heart attack.It's something past, and I'm coming along very well.

In summer of '77, about a year after the heart attack, Oberlin decided to give me an honorary degree, which I accepted with pleasure.We went to Oberlin.The children all came.We had a fine, very pleasant time.

LEVENSON:That must have been a splendid occasion.

J. SERVICE:It was especially pleasant since I didn't have to say anything. [laughter]

One thing I declined, I've had a number of bids to take up some business connection, tourist agencies and exporters and so on, people wanting to do business with China.To me that was capitalizing on my friendship with the Chinese, which I didn't have any interest in doing.

[513a]

OBERLIN COLLEGE
OBERLIN, OHIO
44074

OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

JOHN STEWART SERVICE

Mr. President, John Stewart Service is a man with remarkable achievements in several fields--in diplomacy, in business and in education.After his graduation from Oberlin College in 1931, Mr. Service entered a career in the Foreign Service of the United States, most of which was spent in China, where he had been born and had spent his early years.

His diplomatic career reached its climax during World War II, when the United States faced serious problems in China, having to do with the prosecution of the war with Japan and with mounting rivalry between the National Government of China and the rising Chinese Communist movement. Mr. Service became political adviser to General Stilwell, the Commander-in-Chief of American forces in China, Burma and India.In addition to observing developments in areas under the National Government, he was able to spend time in Yenan, the Communists' wartime capital.His analyses of the Chinese political outlook were masterpieces:they were informed, penetrating, lucid and objective, and anyone wanting to understand why the National Government eventually fell, and why China became the People's Republic of China, cannot do better than to read Service's dispatches.

Unfortunately in the years after the war there were some Americans who did not want to hear the truth about China, and there were some politicians who tried to further their own careers and discredit the truth by smearing the truth-tellers.In 1950 Senator McCarthy brought charges against Service, and the next year the State Department dismissed him, in spite of the fact that its own loyalty review board had repeatedly found no basis for the charges against him.

Between 1952 and 1957, Mr. Service had a second successful career, this one as president of an engineering firm.Meanwhile, however, he fought to clear his good name.In 1957, some six years after the dismissal from the State Department, the Supreme Court of the United States voted unanimously in Mr. Service's favor.He resumed his career in the Foreign Services for the five years from 1957 until 1962.

After retiring from the Foreign Service Jack Service went to the University of California, where, in a third career, he made a very impressive contribution to the university's work in Chinese studies. The forewards and prefaces and footnotes of many books and articles on China coming out of the University of California provide abundant testimony to the value of the help that Mr. Service gave to many graduate students.

[513b]

- 2 -

Through a career-span that was not only brilliant and highly productive, but also very trying, Jack Service has been admired not only for what he did but for what he was.He was and is a man of integrity, and great courage and high character.He did not allow the wrong that was done to him make him a lesser person.

Mr. President, I am very happy indeed to present Mr. John Stewart Service for the Degree of Doctor of Laws.

Ellsworth C. Carlson

John Stewart Service, loyal alumnus, faithful citizen, scholarly diplomat, devoted educator, in the name of your College I confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Laws, with all the rights, privileges and honors thereunto appertaining.

Emil C. Danenberg

May 29, 1977

photo

Ellsworth Carlson '39, professor of history,and John S. Service '31, '77h in the "robing room."

[514]

J. SERVICE:I've now agreed to take a group headed by Clark Kerr to China next spring.This is the first time I've been willing to do that.I think Clark Kerr's group is a good group.They're interested in the relationship between work and education, how work is brought into education at all stages from kindergarten on up, practical work.So, we'll see.So, I may go back to China next spring, '78 (The Services returned to China in 1978 and 1980.In 1978, they also went to Tibet, and in 1980 to Xinjiang (Sinkiang)).

Coda

LEVENSON:Before I turn the tape off, do you have any wrap-up you want to make, any summary on the influences in your life and how you feel about them now?I realize that this is an interim thing.You have the big trip coming up.You have perhaps your own autobiography.You have goodness knows what coming ahead of you.So, I'm not suggesting that this is a coda, just a punctuation mark.

J. SERVICE:I was afraid you were going to ask something like that.[laughter]I really don't have anything very world shattering, I'm afraid.People ask if you've got any regrets, would you do it differently.Generally, I say no, I don't think so.I would have been a little more wise or prudent in some of my dealings.But, on the whole, it s been good.Certainly coming to Berkeley was a very good thing.We've had a very good tapering off period.

LEVENSON:The Services are an ornament to Berkeley.

J. SERVICE:Watching my friends who retire, I think we've done very well.Retirement is a trauma for a lot of people.To me coming back to Berkeley and getting myself involved again with China has been very good.

Particularly I've enjoyed the students, the people I've met at the center, and friends I made.

Even the business episode had its interesting, amusing aspects, after I got my feet into it, got shaken down a bit.

[515]

J. SERVICE:People are often surprised that my son Bob went into the Foreign Service and that I don't feel badly about it.I'm quite proud of his going into the Foreign Service, and pleased.If I were bitter about the Foreign Service I wouldn't have been very happy about his going in.

I don't carry any great feelings of bitterness about the State Department.As I said before, I don't feel the State Department was responsible.Even my retirement was something that was out of the hands of the Department.

I wouldn't necessarily want to go through it all again though.I would say it's been an exciting life. Maybe not all a good life, but it ended up very well.

Talleyrand said he survived.Well, we survived.We've survived better than most of the other people that have gone through the same thing, I think.But that's not all our doing, there's also chance and circumstance, good luck.That's about all I can think of.You got more?

LEVENSON: No. Thank you, Jack.

Transcriber:Teresa Allen
Final Typist:Marie Herold

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