Heroes of the Foreign Service
John Paton Davies & Marie Yovanovitch
I just sent a check to Uncle Sam amounting to a small king's ransom - my 1040 is complicated given the many financial balls I juggle (rest assured, no Manhattan real estate, or shady Deutsche Bank dealings are in the mix!). At the same time, I'm also paying double college tuition for my kids. So, I'm constantly scrambling to raise cash the honest way - in contrast to the crime family that is the Trump administration as seen in the non-stop carousel of arrests and indictments.
But I'm uplifted when I see the news reports on ambassadors Masha Yovanovitch, Bill Taylor, Mike McKinley and DAS George Kent, ex-NSC staffer Fiona Hill and others who've worked unassumingly in the diplomatic trenches and are now telling truth to power before Congress. Pundits and politicians uniformly describe them as "patriots," "heroes" and "true experts" whose mission in life is to serve the American people. As if this is a revelation. In any case, that's when I feel my hard-earned cash is paying for some good.
My heart sinks, however, upon learning about money-bag political donors like Gordon Sondland and others who literally purchase ambassadorial positions with payoffs ranging from $100,000 to, as in Sondland's case, $1 million, or more. And then muck up our foreign policy with their amateurish, clownish, sometimes criminal antics. Here, I'm draining my bank account in order to underwrite the fantasy ambitions of corrupt dilettantes who somehow view being an ambassador as akin to being a member of royalty. Alas, the downsides of being a merit-based republic. We could use some throwaway royal titles.
Trouble is, the American people pay scant attention to diplomacy and their country's professionals who carry it out. Only when our diplomats are taken hostage, as in Iran in 1979, or their outstanding classified reporting and analyses are leaked, as with Wikileaks, or they stand up for truth and justice to corrupt leaders, as today, do Americans, fleetingly, gain a fuller appreciation of what assets their diplomats are to the nation and its security.
I've written extensively in this blog and in published articles about diplo-heroes I've known and served with: Amb. Arnie Raphel, who perished in a plane crash in Pakistan; Richard Queen, an Iran hostage who developed and died from MS; Mike Metrinko, another Iran hostage who was tortured and placed before a mock firing squad; Doug Ramsey, a prisoner of the Viet Cong for seven years who never fully recovered physically or mentally. And the list goes on...
But among my favorite Foreign Service heroes (and martyrs) are the so-called China Hands. These were super-bright, dedicated FSO's who served in China during World War II and later, reported facts as they saw them (namely, Mao's communists would win power over the corrupt Kuomintang) and fell victim to McCarthyism, purged from the State Department and vilified. Their own government betrayed them, rewarding their patriotism with banishment. Studying their principled examples while in college inspired me to pursue a career in the Foreign Service.
My favorite is John Paton Davies. Born to Baptist missionaries in China, Davies spoke fluent Mandarin and joined the fledgling Foreign Service in 1931. After the U.S. entered the war, he was posted as political advisor to Gen. Joseph Stilwell in Kunming. He succeeded in persuading Washington to establish ties with Mao's communist forces in the form of what was called the "Dixie Mission." Davies felt that such contacts were important in order to keep the Chinese communists from coming under Soviet domination; he also saw how corrupt and venal were Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT.
Davies's tour of duty in China resembled something out of Indiana Jones. Flying from Assam to Chongqing in 1943 with journalist Eric Sevareid and a Chinese general, the plane's engines conked out, forcing the passengers and crew to bail out over the Burmese jungle, an area inhabited by Naga headhunters. Davies guided the group to safety for which he was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1948.
But Davies had a falling-out with Stilwell's successor, an arch-conservative army general who, knowing next to nothing about China, fired him. To add insult to injury, the general spread lies that Davies was a communist sympathizer, which Sen. Joe McCarthy later exploited in his character assassination of Davies and the other five State Department China Hands, whom McCarthy accused of having "lost China." After tours in Moscow, Germany and Peru, Davies was fired. He and his family bounced around the globe for years in business pursuits. He died in 1999 at age 92. The China Hands were honored by the Senate in 1971 after Nixon initiated contact with the PRC. Senator Fulbright commented on how the China Hands, who had "reported honestly about conditions, were so persecuted because [they] were honest. This is a strange thing to occur in what is called a civilized country."
That's as true today as it was then.
Without strong congressional support and perhaps intervention, Yovanovitch, Kent and other active duty Foreign Service Officers risk being punished, just as the China Hands were, by our pettily vindictive president and his obsequious secretary of state, abetted by Vichy Republicans in Congress.
This must not be allowed to happen again.