Close enough to feel the heartbeat of a mammoth revolution: U.S. Army Major Cowan and john Service with Mao Tse-Tung and General Yeh Chien-ying at Chinese Communist headquarters in Yenan, China, in 1944. OBERLIN COLLEGE ARCHIVES PHOTOGRAPH
			imagined that decades later historians would say that our century's history might have been a good deal less bloody had the United States followed his recommendations. As the historian Barbara Tuchman said in 1973, doing so "could have spared us and Asia immeasurable, and to some degree irreparable, harm"--including perhaps the Vietnam and Korean wars. Service, now 86--razor sharp in mind, trim in build, and erect in posture--seems philosophical about the unexpected dramas of his career. "Many people seem surprised that I'm not embittered," he said when I met him and his wife, Caroline '31, in their comfortable retirement-complex apartment in California. "If things hadn't come out pretty well in the end, there might be some reason to feel that way." Unexpected outcomes go back to the beginning of Service's career, a career he found by accident. In 1932 he wanted to wed Caroline Schulz, but in those days, he says, a man who wanted to marry needed a job. With the depression in full force there were no openings at all in his field, art history, and no scholarship money for the Ph.D. he wanted. So at a friend's suggestion he took the Foreign Service exam--just for practice, he figured, since it usually took a few tries to pass the grueling three-day test. He passed it on his first attempt. Service had hoped for a different sort of career. And, having spent his entire boyhood in China (his parents were YMCA missionaries), he had hoped for something in the U.S. As it happened, China was the only place where he could find an opening, a low-level Foreign Service clerkship. Two years later he received his officer's commission in the agency, also in China. His fluency in Chinese languages and customs made him especially useful, as did his being "tolerant, just, well-balanced, industrious, cooperative, . . . thorough, . . . painstaking, . . . and keen in judgment," to quote a 1942 efficiency report by the Ambassador to China, Clarence Gauss. Gauss also called Service the most outstanding younger officer who had ever reported to him. Halfway through World War II, the U.S. Army, in Gauss's words, "grabbed" Service and assigned him to its commander in China, General Joseph Stilwell. Stilwell sent him on a 1944 mission to assess the revolutionary movement of Mao Tse-Tung. Living with the Communists in rural China, Service saw that they were certain to defeat the corrupt, unpopular Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek. His reports argued that the U.S. should adjust its policy to fit that reality. We should have treated "the Communists as equals to the Nationalists," says Service recalling his recommendations. "Since the Communists in our view were going to win, there was no advantage in continuing our unilateral alignment with the losing side." Moreover, Service believed that the Communist troops would have battled the Japanese far more effectively than did the Nationalist ones, whose weakness he had carefully documented--and shoring up the fight against the Japanese was the main point of Service's mission. Service's observations went further. He argued that "the [Chinese] Communists weren't as bad as the word communist sounded." In fact, Mao had told him, to quote one of Service's wartime dispatches, that "China must industrialize. This can be done in China only by free enterprise and with the aid of foreign capital." According to Service, the Chinese market reforms of the late 1970s were a return to the policies discussed by Mao and his associates during World War II. The extremes of Communism could have been avoided, he thinks, if the U.S. had established relations with the Chinese Communists during the war. But in those days, he says, "all the experts in the government viewed the world Communist movement as a monolith dictated from Moscow," a view later events, such as the conflicts between China and the Soviet Union, proved wrong. In 1945 Stilwell sent Service to Washington to try to make the case for relations with the Communists. While there, Service engaged in what was then a standard diplomatic practice: he provided some background documents to a journalist, in this case an editor from the magazine Amerasia. Although the documents had been classified, in many cases by Service himself, all of the information they contained was already public. What Service didn't know was that the journalist was under surveillance for his Communist associations. One evening soon after, Service answered an unexpected knock at his door; two men, identifying themselves as FBI agents, arrested him. Regarding his night in jail, Service told a friend in the mid 1960s, "Nowadays, being arrested has a sort of cachet. It was different then. I was overwhelmed with disgrace and shame." Another prisoner, booked for car theft, asked Service what he was in for. He said, "Conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act." The other prisoner had no idea what that was, but said, "It sounds likes something really big." The case was, in fact, an ado about nothing, and a grand jury freed Service without charge. But the affair was a harbinger. The McCarthy Era and Some New Careers In fact, Tuchman called the Amerasia case the "first step toward the tawdry reign of terror soon to be imposed with such astonishing ease by Senator Joe McCarthy." McCarthy gained center stage in 1950 by making bogus claims of having "here in my hands a list of 205 [people] known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who are nevertheless still working and shaping the policy of the State Department." When called to deliver the details, he needed to come up with something concrete. The China Lobby, allies of the now-fallen Chiang Kai-Shek, provided McCarthy with what he needed: supposed conspirators whose activities would explain away the Communist victory in China. Chief among them was Service. The realism of his wartime dispatches was willfully misread as active support for Mao. Added to this was the specter of the Amerasia case, about which McCarthy, true to form, made impossible accusations that the newly established Loyalty Review Board failed to recognize as fictions. No proof of disloyalty was then needed to dismiss a government employee; all that was required was "doubt." On December 14, 1951, Secretary of State Dean Acheson fired Service. Tuchman, in her book Stilwell and the American Experience in China, writes that the case "cowed the future exercises of independent judgment in the foreign service." After the firing the Services considered canceling a long-planned New Year's Eve party, but decided to go ahead with it. Remarkably for the McCarthy era, most of their guests turned up to give them comfort. "Family and friends were what kept our spirits up during that period," says Caroline. "I don't know how we would have gotten on without our friends in the Foreign Service and at Oberlin." In contrast to his friends, Service's potential employers barred their doors when he approached. The United Nations and the multinational corporations, any of which could have made good use of his international expertise, were too worried about public relations to even consider him. The only offers he got were to rent out boats at a marina or to run a small, privately owned steam-valve company. He took the latter, with another unexpected outcome: he invented a new type of steam valve that eventually brought him some valuable stock in the company. Meanwhile, Service sought legal redress. His case reached the Supreme Court in 1957, and the justices quickly reached a unanimous decision: the State Department was to reinstate Service with back pay. A triumph; but it soon became clear that the department had struck a deal with Hill Republicans to keep Service in trivial jobs. He was sent to the consulate in Liverpool where, he says, "I mainly issued visas." Feeling frustrated, he retired from the government and enrolled in a program in political science at the University of California. He earned his M.A. in 1964, but by then his enthusiasm was waning. "The department was very theoretical," he explains, "and was only interested in training doctors of political science to teach other people who wanted to be doctors of political science. I didn't really care about a doctorate, but I wanted to do something interesting connected with China." He soon got his chance. When the school, which knew how distinguished this student was, asked him to join the University of California Center for Chinese Studies, Service leaped at the chance. At the center he oversaw the development of the first large research library in the West to specialize in Communist China. Then he served, until his retirement at age 82, as an invaluable editor and reviewer of books on China for the center and for the University of California Press. He also helped produce some important books of his own. Lost Chance in China: The World War II Dispatches of John S. Service, published by Random House, won a Citation of Excellence as the Best Book on Foreign Affairs, 1974, from the Overseas Press Club of America. He also edited his mother's memoirs of the Service family's life in China; Golden Inches: The China Memoir of Grace Service was published in 1989 by the University of California Press. Vindication The tides of U.S. policy with respect to China--and to Service--turned in the 1970s. When President Richard Nixon, the one-time anti-Communist crusader, went to China in 1971 he was essentially doing what Service had suggested three decades earlier. Shortly before Nixon's trip, Service was one of four "old China hands" invited to China. While there, he chatted for three hours in a private meeting with Chou En-Lai. Henry Kissinger later met privately with Service in Beijing before his own meeting with Chou. In 1973, more than 20 years after firing him, the Foreign Service honored Service with a luncheon. The agency had originally intended to honor him alone, but he insisted that they include others who had been persecuted by McCarthy. And in 1994 he received the Foreign Service Cup, an award given annually to a retired Foreign Service officer by Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired (DACOR). In presenting the award DACOR president William B. Edmondson said, "The life of John Service and his wife of 50 years, Caroline, is a victory of intelligence, patience, and loyalty to country over political opportunism and hysteria." The 750 retired officers who attended the event interrupted Service's acceptance speech with repeated ovations. When I asked Service how he feels about his post-war ordeal, he said, "In the diplomatic career, which I joined by accident but which became my life, things were not all bad. "I had a chance to know, rather well, some of the great men of this century, American and especially Chinese. To be close enough to feel the heartbeat of a mammoth revolution of the world's most populous country--not many people have such a chance. Of course, working close to cataclysms can be dangerous; but I would certainly do it again." Freelance writer Bernard D. Sherman's first article for the Oberlin Alumni Magazine, "Reviving a City's Musical Life" (Fall 1994), was chosen for international distribution by the United States Information Agency. His book on the early-music movement will be published in fall 1996 by Oxford University Press.
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