The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism
By Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh
University of North Carolina Press, 266 pages, $29.95
Now that the Cold War and the totalitarianism that characterized the Soviet regime from 1918 to 1991 have passed, perhaps we can say two things with some measure of certainty.
First, Western apologists for the Soviet Union were naive at best, wrong-headed or cynical at worst. Yet, such people largely were marginalized after 1946, and neither American communists nor the efforts of their sympathizers had much influence in post-World War II America.
Second, while the Soviet Union was a very real power and would have defended the Motherland as ferociously as it had fought against Germany, it is doubtful that it represented a major aggressive threat to Western interests, short of a mutually destructive nuclear holocaust. A “war of national liberation” here, a Cuban convert there–but realism tempered Soviet capabilities and ambitions. And both sides sadly learned lessons of their limitations. Witness Afghanistan. Witness Vietnam, which not only demonstrated the limitations of American military power but also showed that Soviet (and Chinese) influence had its limitations there even before the collapse of Soviet commumism.
The Cold War has receded, and we seem to have forgotten the nuclear terror we lived with day after day. Memory fades and we trivialize the past. A year ago, CNN led off its news broadcast in the following order: first, a figure skater’s conspiracy to maim her opponent; second, a woman’s cutting off her husband’s penis; and third–third–Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin’s agreeing to turn their nuclear weapons away from each other. Fifty years of looking down the tubes of man’s most creative instruments of total destruction, and the news is buried beneath a mound of prurient titillation.
The Cold War now belongs to historians, and there the war continues, the sides dividing themselves as they did throughout the long twilight of the Cold War, along lines of criticism or apology. The most striking new development has been a vigorous defense and celebration of domestic anti-communism. The worst excesses of the phenomenon–McCarthyism, for example–usually are dismissed as aberrational. Instead, William Buckley’s more intellectual brand of anti-communism is applauded. But the fact is that Buckley and his like stalked not only the bona fides and motives of communists and so-called fellow travelers, but anyone who questioned the very premises of the Cold War and American motives. The assumptions that drove American foreign policy, including unlimited military expenditures on nuclear weapons, chemical and bacteriological stockpiles, and conventional weaponry; that foreclosed any options of neutrality by other nations; and that launched the most dangerous assault on civil liberties in American history–they were not to be questioned.
Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh have devoted great effort to probing the subversive role of American communists. For them, the Amerasia spy case of 1945 is central to understanding the resulting domestic conflict over communism at home and abroad. The case actually had minor implications for espionage and is, one can argue, a record of expansive egos, high comedy and, eventually and most significantly, a cynical exploitation for a major battle over the meaning of patriotism.
Amerasia was a journal of current Asian affairs, and in its brief existence it had published articles by a number of scholars and middle-level government officials, articles consistently sympathetic to the growing trends of nationalism and anti-imperialism emerging throughout Asia, including, to be sure, clear sympathy for the Chinese communists’ cause and profound contempt for Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang party. We tend to forget how fluid the situation was as the Pacific war wound down. Nationalist rebels, at first attracted to Japan’s ostensible policy of Asia for the Asians, eventually recognized Japanese imperialism for what it was, worked to expel the Japanese, and then sought to establish indigenous governments and obliterate the vestiges of Western imperialism. This included the Chinese communists, Sukarno in Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and native groups in India, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Malaya and the Philippines. American policy toward these movements was uncertain, and numerous officials and writers worked mightily to influence a favorable policy.
In June 1945, the FBI arrested six people associated with Amerasia, accusing them of espionage on behalf of the Chinese communists. The journal’s editor, Philip Jaffe, was a communist sympathizer but apparently not under any official or party discipline. His efforts at espionage involved securing leaked documents that revealed the internal governmental debates on future policies. Of the six arrested, only Jaffe and an associate were convicted of unauthorized possession of documents. The matter soon was forgotten, written off largely for what it was: a clumsy and quite obvious attempt to publicize and discredit competing forces in policy debates. Nothing here really had any espionage value, that is, material that would have given decided advantage to one side or another.
But it was not the end of the affair, for it re-emerged in 1950 as conservatives charged that the case had been rigged and covered up by government officials, aided and abetted by outside influential lobbyists. Enough had happened to give such charges just enough currency to make the affair more than it deserved to be. Ironically, Thomas Corcoran, the once-prominent New Dealer but a ubiquitous Washington “fixer” by 1945, had a lot to do with icing the case because it might prove too embarrassing to Chiang, his family and allies–and not just to the communists. In any event, Sen. Joseph McCarthy used the case to “prove” his charge that communists had infiltrated the State Department. McCarthy, of course, proved nothing except that some powerful, wealthy backers, along with the eager enthusiasm of the media, could arouse the nation to a fever pitch of hysteria.
Klehr and Radosh have uncovered extensive FBI files on the case, including transcripts of wiretaps. Even in those days of lessened concern with civil rights, many of the FBI’s evidence-gathering activities, including its surveillance of lawyer-client conversations, would have made the case difficult to prosecute further. Still, the authors contend the case demonstrated the pervasiveness of communist influence.
Its ultimate significance, however, was its impact on American Far Eastern policy. John Stewart Service, one of the defendants who had leaked some of the material, was a foreign service officer who had been among the most critical of Chiang during the war years. He and other “China Hands” in the field and the State Department warned of Chiang’s corruption and declining power and influence, and urged the government to adopt a meaningful dialogue with Mao. He was, after all, a “political officer.” The upshot, of course, was the question made famous by McCarthy, Richard Nixon and various forgettable characters: “Who lost China?”–as if China ever was “ours” to “lose.” The resulting debate gave new impetus to domestic anti-communism, hounded the China experts out of government and left the nation with a bankrupt Asian policy–if it had one at all. Down to the late 1960s, the State Department continued to peddle the line that Vietnam was merely a Chinese communist puppet, a notion wholly out of accord with more than 1,000 years of history. The Sino-Vietnamese hostility was (and remains) so sharp that in 1979, war erupted between the two countries.
After six years of fruitless loyalty investigations, Service nevertheless was dismissed. Buckley smugly concluded: “McCarthy was . . . vindicated.” In tune with the new line of history, Klehr and Radosh avoid such a crass (and absurd) conclusion; yet their mean-spirited details serve a similar purpose. Service was “an opportunist” with “lean good looks” who may have had a mistress whom he may have considered leaving. So what? Was he an opportunist because he clearly recognized the corruption and incompetence of the Chiang regime and the necessity for dealing with Mao? Why such quirky details instead of focusing on the real consequences and impact of the case?
The Amerasia affair reminds us of how little it took to foment hysteria in the 1940s and 1950s. Any support for an idea or policy that deviated from hard-line anti-communism was suspect and cause for patriotic parades. It was a time, remember, when Nixon attacked Truman’s policies of containment–which he later pursued himself. That kind of patriotism sheltered scoundrels who endowed the era with its legacy of hysteria and inquisition. We “won” the Cold War, but we should remember the tremendous costs, some of which were unnecessary. Unfortunately, the authors gloss over the fact that in the name of anti-communism, reputations and careers of innocents were destroyed, and often we made a mockery of civil liberties. We would have won anyway.
