John Service, the son of missionaries who grew up in China, was one of the Department’s “China hands,” an expert on the region who also served as a key member of the “Dixie Mission,” which met with Mao and other Communist Chinese in Yenan in 1944. He and a few others correctly predicted that Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the Kuomintang, would fall because of the KMT’s corruption, incompetence and brutality. However, this position ran afoul of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who blamed Service and his colleagues for “losing China” because of their Communist sympathies. In 1950, McCarthy singled out Service as one of “the 205 known communists” in the State Department; he was dismissed from the Foreign Service on December 13, 1951.
In these excerpts, John’s wife Caroline describes the traumatic experience of being overseas while her husband is in Washington to answer McCarthy’s accusations. She tells of the lengthy court battle, which ended in the Supreme Court, the struggles to make ends meet, and his fight to win back his job and redeem his name. Ultimately he did win reinstatement, but he was unable to get his career back on track. She also notes the irony that one of the very people who had gotten Service dismissed because of his views on China — Richard Nixon — was the same person who would be praised years later for normalizing relations with Beijing. Caroline Service was interviewed by Jewell Fenzi on January 10, 1987. You can read Part I, taken from John Service’s oral history, regarding the sham proceedings and dismissal.
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