Books in Brief: Patrick J. Hurley and American Foreign Policy

Patrick J. Hurley and American Foreign Policy, by Russell D. Buhite (Cornell, 342 pp., $14.50).

Patrick J. Hurley, until his appointment as U.S. Ambassador to China in late 1944, had a distinguished but unspectacular career as a successful businessman in New Mexico, later as President Hoover’s Secretary of War, and finally in a series of wartime diplomatic assignments for President Roosevelt. His performance in China, however, has made him anathema to most of the contemporary “China Hands.” Why this precipitous fall from grace? It was due primarily to his identification of three foreign service officers, one in Washington and two in China, whose exuberance for Mao Tse-tung led them to attempt to sabotage U.S. plans for gaining the support of all Chinese factions to prosecute the war against Japan. The two officers in China were, of course, John S. Service and John P. Davies; the third member of the cabal, John C. Vincent, was at the China desk of the State Department in Washington. Service and Davies were expelled from China at Hurley’s noisy insistence. His career never survived the incident; Hurley died uncelebrated in 1963. The saboteurs, however, have recently been the subjects of an attempted rehabilitation (though the 1970 release of the incriminating Amerasia Papers study by the Senate Judiciary Committee complicated the enterprise) by many of their longtime supporters claiming that the Service-Davies-Vincent cabal was right from the start about China. Buhite, though no admirer of Hurley or his views on China, usefully sketches the Davies-Service attempts to sabotage U.S. policy in China in 1944-45. We can be thankful for small favors.

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William Schneider

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Patrick J. Hurley and American Foreign Policy, by Russell D. Buhite (Cornell, 342 pp., $14.50).

Patrick J. Hurley, until his appointment as U.S. Ambassador to China in late 1944, had a distinguished but unspectacular career as a successful businessman in New Mexico, later as President Hoover’s Secretary of War, and finally in a series of wartime diplomatic assignments for President Roosevelt. His performance in China, however, has made him anathema to most of the contemporary “China Hands.” Why this precipitous fall from grace? It was due primarily to his identification of three foreign service officers, one in Washington and two in China, whose exuberance for Mao Tse-tung led them to attempt to sabotage U.S. plans for gaining the support of all Chinese factions to prosecute the war against Japan. The two officers in China were, of course, John S. Service and John P. Davies; the third member of the cabal, John C. Vincent, was at the China desk of the State Department in Washington. Service and Davies were expelled from China at Hurley’s noisy insistence. His career never survived the incident; Hurley died uncelebrated in 1963. The saboteurs, however, have recently been the subjects of an attempted rehabilitation (though the 1970 release of the incriminating Amerasia Papers study by the Senate Judiciary Committee complicated the enterprise) by many of their longtime supporters claiming that the Service-Davies-Vincent cabal was right from the start about China. Buhite, though no admirer of Hurley or his views on China, usefully sketches the Davies-Service attempts to sabotage U.S. policy in China in 1944-45. We can be thankful for small favors.