User:Peter2212/Claude A. Buss

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Claude Albert Buss (29 November 1903 - 17 November 1998) was a professor emeritus of history and a key American diplomat in the Philippines during World War II. Although not formally counted as one of the State Department's "China Hands", he was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer in Peiping and Nanjing prior to the war, and served in multiple U.S. government and policy advisory positions covering East Asia for almost seven decades. As an academic, he taught in major universities and colleges, authored multiple texts which became standard reference works in the field of East Asian studies, and influenced generations of American civilian and military leaders and policy makers working in and around East Asia.[1]

Early life[edit]

Claude Buss was born in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, on November 29, 1903. [2] He took a B.A. from Washington Missionary College (1922), an M.A. from Susquehanna University (1924), and the Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1927); he later received an L.L.D. from the University of Southern California. After advanced study at l'Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques and l'Institut des Hautes Études Internationales in Paris, he became a U.S. Foreign Service Officer.

Career in China[edit]

Service was first assigned to a clerkship position in the American consulate in the capital of the Yunnan province, Kunming. Two years later, Service was promoted to Foreign Service Officer and sent to Beijing for language study. In 1938, he was assigned to the Shanghai Consulate General under Clarence E. Gauss. When Gauss was promoted to ambassador, he made Service Third Secretary of the American Embassy at Chungking. As time progressed, Service was eventually promoted to Second Secretary.

During the early war years, Service wrote increasingly critically harsh reports on the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek. Service criticized the Nationalist government as "fascist," "undemocratic," and "feudal,"[3]. This caught the attention of John P. Davies, a Foreign Service Officer working as a diplomatic attaché to General Joseph Stilwell. In the summer of 1943, Davies managed to have Service, among two others, assigned to him to assist him in his duties. When the U.S. Army Observation Group, also known as the Dixie Mission, was formed to travel to the Communist territory, Davies selected John Service to be the first State Department official to visit the region.

The Dixie Mission and Yan'an[edit]

Last Page from Service's First Report from Yan'an. Page One, Two and Three here.

John Service arrived in Yan'an, the capital of the Communist Party of China, on July 22, 1944. This had a direct impact on the rest of Service's life. In Yan'an, Service met and interviewed many of the top leaders of the CPC, such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. He sent back many reports over the next four months that were highly positive of the Chinese Communists. Over the course of several memorandums, Service wrote of the Communists as "progressive" and "democratic."[4] In one instance, Service went so far as to claim that "The Communists are in China to stay and China's destiny is not Chiang's but theirs."[5] At the same time, he continued to write critically of the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, whom he considered hopelessly corrupt and incompetent. Service and the other American political officers eventually advocated a policy of support for the Communists as well as the Nationalists. They believed a civil war was practically inevitable and that the Communists would triumph in such a struggle. If the U.S. supported the Communists, then the U.S. would be able to work constructively with them when they came to power.

In the event, the new U.S. Ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley, rejected the recommendations of Service and the other Foreign Service officers. A policy of exclusive support for the Nationalists was continued with a mistaken belief that the Communists could not be brought into a unified government. All the political officers, Service included, were recalled from China at Hurley's request. Hurley later blamed them for his diplomatic failures in China.[6]

Post China career[edit]

John Service returned to Washington in 1945 and was soon arrested as a suspect in the Amerasia Case. In the case, Service was accused of illegally passing over confidential material concerning his time in China to the editors of the Amerasia magazine. Service was ultimately cleared of the charges, but five years later was dismissed from the State Department after accusations of being a Communist by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In turn, the former foreign service officer sued over the dismissal in a case that made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States. This ultimately led to his reinstatement at the State Department. In the second half of the 1940's he served in three overseas posts. He was briefly attached to Douglas Macarthur's staff in Tokyo, Japan, but he spent a significant amount of time in New Zealand and then in India. It was while he was stationed in India that he was called back to Washington to testify before Congress.

Disloyalty charges[edit]

After his arrival in D.C., FBI surveillance recorded that Service met with Amerasia editor Philip Jaffe on April 19, 1945 at D.C.'s Statler Hotel. An FBI report stated: "Service, according to the microphone surveillance, apparently gave Jaffe a document which dealt with matters the Chinese had furnished to the United States government in confidence."[7] In China, Service had already established a reputation for meeting with Communists and reporters, as well as anyone else who might provide information for his duty. Former ambassador to China, Clarence Gauss testified later during the McCarthy era:

"In Chungking, Mr. Service was a political officer of the Embassy...His job was to get every bit of information that he possibly could...he would see the foreign press people. He saw the Chinese press people. He saw anybody in any of the embassies or legations that were over there that were supposed to know anything...He went to the Kuomintang headquarters...he went to the Communist headquarters. He associated with everybody and anybody in Chungking that could give him information, and he pieced together this puzzle that we had constantly before us as to what was going on in China and he did a magnificent job at it."[8]

Service had numerous meetings with Jaffe, ignorant of the ongoing investigation of the editor. Adrian Fisher, the senior legal officer at the State Department at the time, later commented, "It was like a scene out of Heaven's My Destination. Jack Service went into a bawdy house thinking it was still a girls' boarding school."[9]

After Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and FBI investigators broke into in the offices of Amerasia, finding hundreds of government documents, many labeled "secret," "top secret," or "confidential," Service was arrested as a suspect.[10] But none of the documents Service gave Jaffe were classified. The documents the government found that had various labels of classification were not ones Service provided.[citation needed] Nevertheless, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover later wrote he thought he had an "airtight case" against Service.[11] However, when the Justice Department submitted its evidence to a Federal Grand Jury, the jury which elected to indict Jaffe, refused in a 20 - 0 vote to indict Service.

Service was then subject to loyalty and security hearings every year from 1946 to 1951, with the exception of 1948. In each hearing, he was cleared of any suspicions of being disloyal to the United States.[12]

Five years after Amerasia, on March 14, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Service of being a Communist sympathizer in the State Department. Service was cleared of the charges by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, also known as the Tydings Committee. However, a final review board found "reasonable doubt" as to Service's loyalty, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson ordered his dismissal. In the "red scare" turmoil of the early 1950s, a number of diplomats became scapegoats for the fall of China to the Communists. John P. Davies was also forced out of the State Department.

From 1952 on, Service appealed his dismissal from the State Department and in the meantime worked for a steam trap company in New York. His case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously voted in his favor.[13] The Court found that Service's dismissal had violated U.S. State Department procedures. The Court explained that the Department of State's own Loyalty Security Board had found no evidence of Service being disloyal or a security risk.[14]

In The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism, authors Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh state “[a]ny lingering doubts about Service’s true position are erased by the evidence of the FBI surveillance. If he had been a secret Communist, much less a spy, some better evidence would likely have surfaced in the transcripts”.[15]

Return to the State Department[edit]

Service returned to active duty in the State Department in 1957 but was not given very important assignments. He was first assigned to the transportation division at the State and then posted overseas to the U.S. consultate in Liverpool, England. Sensing that he would not be allowed to advance again as a Foreign Service officer, he retired in 1962. He then pursued a Master of Arts degree in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduation, Service worked as library curator for the school's Center for Chinese Studies into the 1970's and then served as editor for the center's publications.

In 1971, preceding President Nixon's visit to China, Service was one of a handful of Americans invited back to the country, as relations with the U.S. were normalized. He met again with Zhou Enlai during his visit, and he and his wife Caroline appeared on the cover of Parade Magazine.

On February 3, 1999, John Stewart Service died in Oakland, California.


Service's record in retrospect[edit]

Much of what Service and the other officers wrote in the 1940s has been vindicated by the passage of time. Service's appraisal of the nationalists has been supported even by people who criticize Mao. Prior to the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War in 1946, Service had accurately predicted the Communists would win the war, thanks to their ability to stamp down on corruption, gain popular support, and to organize grass root organizations.[16] The positive reports he wrote from the Communist headquarters did not, in retrospect, capture the entire story. The cruelty that went with Communist efficiency became known to all during the years Mao was in power. Service hoped that the Communists would adopt free market and democratic reforms if they were pushed in the right direction, with U.S. support. Later in life, Service wrote that he believed an American relationship with the Communists might have even prevented or drastically altered the course of history surrounding the Korean War and Vietnam War.[17] It is difficult to say whether the United States would have been able to foster reform or restraint had the U.S. engaged the Communists in 1944-45, as was recommended by Service. But as the recommendations of Service and others were rejected, it is unfair to blame them for the Communist takeover of China.

References[edit]

  • Service, John S. (1974). Lost Chance in China: The World War II: Despatches of John S. Service. Random House. ISBN 0394484363.
  • Klehr, Harvey; Radosh, Ronald (1996). The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCartheyism. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807822450.
  • Service, John S. (1971). The Amerasia Papers: Some Problems in the History of US-China Relations. Center for Chinese Studies, University of California.
  • Kahn, E. J. (1975). The China Hands : America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them. Penguin Books. ISBN 0140043012.
  • Buckley, William F. (1954). McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning. Regnery Publishing. ISBN 0-89526-472-2.
  • Evans, M. Stanton (2007). Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies. Crown Publishing Group. ISBN-13 9781400081059.

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Tuchman, Barbara (1971). Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45. Grove Press. pp. pg. 526. ISBN 0802138527. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
  2. ^ Biography of Service by Oberlin College via John Service Papers.
  3. ^ Senate Internal Security Committee, The Amerasia Papers: A Clue to the Catastrophe of China, January 26, 1970, pp. 577, 592, 1015
  4. ^ Ibid., pp. 406, 410, 577, 579, 589, 1014
  5. ^ Amerasia Papers, pp. 113, 112
  6. ^ Carter, Mission to Yenan, 131.
  7. ^ Report of the United States Senate Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees, 1950, appendix, p. 2051
  8. ^ Esherick, Joseph W., Lost Chance in China: The World War II: Despatches of John S. Service, (New York: Random House, 1974), p.xvi - xvii.
  9. ^ Kahn, The China Hands, p. 166.
  10. ^ Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ISBN 0-8078-2245-0, p. 131
  11. ^ FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to Peyton Ford, Assistant to the Attorney General, re Philip Jacob Jaffe, was., et al., Espionage, May 4, 1950 (FBI file: Amerasia, Section 54)
  12. ^ Esherik,Lost Chance in China, p., xix.
  13. ^ Carter, Mission to Yenan, 215.
  14. ^ SERVICE v. DULLES, 354 U.S. 363 (1957) - SCOTUS Opinion of case.
  15. ^ Klehr, Harvey and Radosh, Ronald (1996). The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism. The University of North Carolina Press. pp. p. 216. ISBN 0-8078-2245-0. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  16. ^ John Service, Report No. 1, 7/28/1944., to Commanding General Fwd. Ech., USAF – CBI, APO 879. “First Formal Impressions of Northern Shensi Communist Base.” State Department, NARA, RG 59. Page One, Two, Three, and Four.
  17. ^ Service, John S. (1971). The Amerasia Papers: Some Problems in the History of US-China Relations. Center for Chinese Studies, University of California. pp. pp. 191-192. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)

External links[edit]

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