At the height of the Mc Carthyite hysteria of the 1950s, John Paton Davies, Jr., was summoned to the State Department one morning and fired. His offense? The career diplomat had counseled the U.S. government during World War II that the Communist forces in China were poised to take over the country—which they did, in 1949. Davies joined the thousands of others who became the victims of a political maelstrom that engulfed the country and deprived the United States of the wisdom and guidance of an entire generation of East Asian diplomats and scholars.
The son of American missionaries, Davies was born in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Educated in the United States, he joined the ranks of the newly formed Foreign Service in the 1930s and returned to China, where he would remain until nearly the end of World War II. During that time he became one of the first Americans to meet and talk with the young revolutionary known as Mao Zedong. He documented the personal excesses and political foibles of Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. As a political aide to General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, the wartime commander of the Allied forces in East and South Asia, he traveled widely in the region, meeting with colonial India’s Nehru and Gandhi to gauge whether their animosity to British rule would translate into support for Japan. Davies ended the war serving in Moscow with George F. Kennan, the architect of America’s policy toward the Soviet Union. Kennan found in Davies a lifelong friend and colleague. Neither, however, was immune to the virulent anticommunism of the immediate postwar years.
China Hand is the story of a man who captured with wry and judicious insight the times in which he lived, both as observer and as actor.
Table of Content
Foreword
—Todd S. Purdum
PART I. LEAVING AND RETURNING
i The Firing
ii From China to America
iii My Itinerant Education
iv Hankow, the Far East Desk, and Pearl Harbor
PART II. ”THIS ASSIGNMENT IS NOT MADE AT YOUR REQUEST NOR FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE”
v To Asia with Stilwell
vi A Moment with Mr. Gandhi
vii Nehru and ”The Problem”
viii An American in India
ix Willkie, Washington, and Vinegar Joe
x Among the Naga Headhunters
PART III. PUBLIC AND PERSONAL DIPLOMACY
xi The Politics of War
xii Cairo: With Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang
xiii The Resurrection of Britain’s Empire in Asia May Be Said to Lie Outside the Scope of Our Mission
xiv Patricia’s Passage to India; A Soong Family Fracas
PART IV. THE QUESTION OF CHINA
xv Stilwell’s Wars
xvi The Generalissimo Versus the General
xvii Meeting Mao
xviii Communists Versus Nationalists Versus Hurley
PART V. MOSCOW NIGHTS AND DAYS
xix Posted to Moscow
xx Hurley’s Opening Salvo
xxi Postwar Moscow
PART VI. AT WAR AT HOME
xxii Returning to America, and the China Lobby
xxiii Assigned to Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff
xxiv Working with the National Security Council
xxv Revisiting Asia in 1948
xxvi ”The Most Nefarious Campaign of Half-Truths and Untruth in the History of the Republic”
Epilogue
—Bruce Cumings
Index
Acknowledgments
Gallery follows page 240
About the author
John Paton Davies, Jr. (1908-99) was a Foreign Service officer in the U.S. Department of State from 1931 to 1954. He was also the author of Foreign and Other Affairs and Dragon by the Tail: American, British, Japanese, and Russian Encounters with China and One Another. Todd S. Purdum is national editor of Vanity Fair. Bruce Cumings is Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, most recently Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
45,577 Ebooks in this category
