China Scapegoat, the Diplomatic Ordeal of John Carter Vincent

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KIRKUS REVIEW: Now that diplomatic relations with the Peoples' Republic have arrived, the famous group of State Department China experts purged during the postwar anticommunist upsurge threaten to attain saintly status. May (History, Univ. of Delaware) takes up the case of the late former head of State's East Asia desk, who never told his own story. It's good material: Vincent, Kansas born and Georgia bred, joined the Consular Service to see the world and wound up in China's Hunan Province in 1924, just in time to experience the most anarchic period of the civil war. Over the next 16 years, he gradually became more knowledgeable about China. and developed a sensitivity to the realities of the country that put him in opposition to most U.S. policies. Painfully aware of the decadence and corruption of Chiang's Kuomintang, Vincent urged that the U.S. reduce its aid to the Nationalists, though he did not support a pro-Communist policy (in the context, however, it may have been almost the same thing). This was enough to bring him under fire from Joe McCarthy who, according to May, utilized fabricated evidence of Vincent's membership in the Communist Party and logic-twisting evidence of collusion with Moscow. The eventual upshot was Vincent's dismissal from the Foreign Service for allegedly faulty reporting, and his retirement from public life. But this is a familiar story, different only in detail. The early biographic material is largely fluff, and the most interesting aspect of Vincent's story--his lackadaisical reaction to the attacks against him--is largely unexplained. Though he had fought for his China policy in the 1930s and '40s, Vincent had to be pushed to fight for himself later on. May's story never rises to tragedy altogether, and the "ordeal" remains too "diplomatic" to get very emotional about.

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