John Paton Davies, Jr.

John Paton Davies Jr. was an American diplomat and Medal of Freedom recipient. He was one of the China Hands, whose careers in the Foreign Service were destroyed by McCarthyism and the reaction to the fall of China.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Davies was the elder of two sons born to Baptist missionaries John Paton Davies, Sr., an American, and his Canadian-born wife, Helen MacNeill, a former singer and church soloist. Davies was born and raised in China, where as a teenager he attended the Shanghai American School, a missionary institution. He then spent two undergraduate years at the University of Wisconsin Experimental College, followed by successive years at Yenching University, Beijing, and Columbia University, which granted him a B.S. degree in 1931. Davies joined the Foreign Service the following year, then returned to China in 1933, where he served successively in Kunming, Beijing, Shenyang, and Hankou, before returning to Beijing. On 24 August 1942 Davies married Patricia Louise Grady, a Washington Post correspondent and the daughter of Henry F. Grady, the first American ambassador to India. The couple had seven children.

Immediately after the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Davies became diplomatic aide and political adviser to U.S. General Joseph W. Stilwell, the new commander of the China-India-Burma theater. Until Stilwell's 1944 recall, Davies accompanied him through the Allied forces' initial defeat in Burma and subsequent retreat to China's temporary Nationalist capital, Chongqing. Thereafter, until 1945 Davies advised Patrick J. Hurley, presidential envoy and United States ambassador to China.

But Davies was much more than a desk-bound diplomat. In 1943 Davies and seventeen other American officials and journalists (among them Eric Sevareid) were forced to parachute from the plane during a flight from China to India when an engine failed. Once on the ground, Davies led the group to safety on a harrowing month-long trek through the jungle. He received the Medal of Freedom in 1948 for this heroic effort.

The U.S. government dispatched the Dixie Mission to Chinese Communist headquarters at Yan'an in 1944, due partly to Davies's insistence. Its purpose was to encourage Chinese Communist efforts to repel the Japanese invasion, but it also sought to evaluate Communist strength. Impressed by Communist discipline, austerity, and popular support, several of the Dixie Mission's members came to believe Mao Zedong would probably ultimately overthrow the Nationalist government, and Davies urged the United States, without abandoning Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), to cultivate the Chinese Communists.

Davies visited several times, fruitlessly relaying relatively cooperative messages from the Communist leader Mao Tsetung to top American officials. In late 1944 Davies assisted Ambassador Hurley's efforts to negotiate a truce and forge a coalition government that would include both Chinese Nationalists and Communists. Davies characterized China's civil war as a conflict incomprehensible to foreigners, from which the United States should remain aloof. When this became impossible, he recommended continuing American aid to the ruling Nationalist Kuomintang regime under Chiang Kai-shek, but also suggested that if, as he anticipated, the Communists eventually took power, the United States should cooperate with them to preclude a Sino-Soviet alliance.

Davies realized only later that he had underestimated the Communists' pro-Soviet leanings and that he had confused their popularity with a commitment to democracy. This led Hurley to suspect Davies of harboring pro-Communist sympathies. From 1945 onward Davies and other China specialists were denounced by the "China Lobby," a powerful group of industrialists and politicians that supported the Nationalist forces in Taiwan. After China fell to the Communists, Davies and his fellow China specialists also drew the ire of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican junior senator who from the late 1940s to mid-1950s spearheaded an extremist campaign against those who were suspected of being pro-Communist.

Despite the cloud of suspicion that was beginning to surround him, Davies became first secretary at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1945. Two years later he was appointed deputy director of the policy planning staff. In contrast to the China Lobby's fears, his advice and analyses tended to be relatively hardline. Although he favored U.S. recognition of the People's Republic of China, he repeatedly condemned its pro-Soviet attitude, and in 1950 even suggested the United States exploit its nuclear superiority to force a showdown with the Soviet Union.

In July 1950, shortly after the Korean War began, Davies warned of the increasing probability that China might intervene in the conflict. He recommended that the United States inform the Chinese government that, should this occur, the United States would retaliate with a major bombing campaign against Chinese territory. In spring 1951, following the massive Chinese military intervention of November 1950, Davies helped arrange an unofficial Soviet-American dialogue that eventually helped bring about peace talks.

Davies underwent eight separate security investigations by the civil service loyalty review board between 1950 and 1953. Although each investigation cleared him, they failed to satisfy the China Lobby. McCarthyites insisted that Davies's proposal to recruit double agents from Americans friendly with the Chinese Communists proved that he was out to subvert his country's intelligence network. Davies joined the United States High Commission in Germany in 1951 as director of political affairs. In 1953 the new Eisenhower administration, apprehensive of McCarthyism but unable to force the senator's resignation, exiled Davies to diplomatic obscurity in Peru. A ninth security investigation in 1954, based partly upon testimony from Hurley, characterized Davies as disloyal, whereupon Secretary of State John Foster Dulles dismissed him, stating Davies had "demonstrated a lack of judgment, discretion, and reliability."

Davies, virtually unemployable in the prevailing political climate, established a furniture design and manufacturing business called Estilo in Lima, Peru, and wrote a weekly newspaper column. Returning to Washington in 1964, he published Foreign and Other Affairs (1964), a collection of his newspaper articles criticizing U.S. Latin American policy as insufficiently supportive of strong governments. It wasn't until 1969 that was he rehabilitated and his pension rights reinstated.

Davies and other old China hands, their reputations greatly restored by the impact of the Vietnam War and the new opening to China, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. In that same year Davies moved to Málaga, Spain, where he continued to write his newspaper columns. He also produced an autobiographical account of U.S. China policy, analyzing its persistent inability to influence China. Later in the 1970s Davies settled in Asheville, North Carolina, where he died of multiple organ failure in 1999. After a private funeral service, his remains were cremated. Davies was the most intellectual of the U.S. State Department China experts, whose post-World War II purging severely crippled the country's capacity to develop prudent and rational policies toward Asia.

-- Priscilla Roberts

FURTHER READINGS

Davies's personal papers are held by the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library at Independence, Missouri. His diplomatic reports and other official papers, including records on his investigation and eventual dismissal, are among Department of State records in National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Many documents written by Davies are included in the relevant volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, published by the U.S. Department of State, and Anna Kasten Nelson, ed., The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, 3 vols. (1983). Davies himself published Foreign and Other Affairs (1964), the memoir Dragon by the Tail: American, British, Japanese, and Russian Encounters with China and One Another (1972), and reflected further in Paul Gordon Lauren, ed., The China Hands' Legacy: Ethics and Diplomacy (1987). Eric Sevareid, in Not So Wild a Dream (1946), details Davies wartime heroism, and Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (1997), describes Davies's wartime dealings with the Chinese Communists. Davies's truncated foreign service career is discussed in David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972); George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950-1963 (1972); Ely Jacques Kahn, The China Hands: America's Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them (1975); and James Fetzer, "The Case of John Paton Davies, Jr.," Foreign Service Journal 54 (1976): 15-22, 31-32. Informative sketches of Davies's role in successive presidential administrations are given in Eleanora W. Schoenebaum, ed., Political Profiles: The Truman Years (1978), and Political Profiles: The Eisenhower Years (1980). Obituaries are in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Chicago Sun-Times (all 24 Dec. 1999). Davies recorded several television interviews on U.S. China policy in the 1990s.