The Nation: The Old China Hands

Into the hearing room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week strode two men who had passed more than a quarter-century in the flickering light and shade of nonrecognition. John Stewart Service and John Paton Davies Jr., both 65, once middle-echelon Foreign Service officers of the State Department, as long ago as 1944 correctly diagnosed the power and potential of Mao Tse-tung's Chinese Communist Party and urged that the U.S. make an early accommodation with it. Had this been done, they contend—and many observers agree—the U.S. might have been spared two wars—in...