Talk:Amerasia

Untitled

This article seems badly written to me. It jumps right into the subject without any introduction, and much of the writing is amateurish and unencyclopedic (eg, "Service got off scott-free"). It also seems rather POV, biased against the accused. I'm in the middle of researching John P. Davies or I'd work on this. This will remind me to come back to it if no one else fixes it. Tualha 02:43, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

More right-wing nonsense from Haynes

Nobs, who appears to be listed as the editor of this thing, can't seem to find any other sources for history beyond Klehr and/or Haynes, two of the worst historians working in the field. The correct number of documents seized was 800 not 1000. It was not the OSS who illegally burgled and tapped phones but the FBI. Three were indicted by the Grand Jury, Jaffe, Larsen, and Roth. Service was cleared. Because of the FBI's illegal searches the charged were dropped from espionage to illegal possession of gov't documents. Jaffe was fined $2,500, Larsen, $500, and Andrew Roth, a Naval officer who had been discharged the day before the arrests, saw the indcitment against him dropped. Jaffe was not a member of the CP, but admitted later to being a "close fellow traveler."

The FBI had already raided Jaffe's office and were watching Jaffe when John Service returned home on leave in April 1945. The classified documents the FBI had taken were from Larsen, a State Department employee, not Service, and they were from the State, Navy and War department. Later, Assistant AG McInerney testified that the documents, "were very innocuous . . . a little above the level of teacup gossip in the Far East," and that the classifications "were nothing short of silly." It was Jaffe who looked up Service, and as Jaffe's magazine, at the time was the only specialist magazine dealing with the Far East (and a good one at the time, later on it became less so), Service allowed Jaffe to see personal copies of his reports on China. A not unusual occurance, as he had previously allowed other journalists to use them for background information. They included a report of an interview with Mao, 8 to 10 copies of memoranda on China, that did not contain any discussion of US political or military policy, and an unclassified transcript of a radio broadcast out of Yenan, the Communist Chinese capital. Service passed no military information, or classified information, to Jaffe, nor was it alleged that he had. That was why he was cleared by the Grand Jury.

John Service's official reports as a "China Hand" were indeed critical of Chiang Kai-shek, and for good reason. Chiang was a corrupt war-lord, who was rapidly losing the support of the Chinese people. Service, and others, were advocating a more even-handed policy toward Mao, one closer to our relations with Tito. As Service told me in a interview, "The State Department reprimanded me for being indiscreet. I said, 'Sure I've been indiscreet. I'm willing to acknowledge that.' I felt our policy in supporting the Chinese Nationalist was a hell of a mistake. I was talking freely about the need for an evenhanded policy in a rather hotheaded, youthful way. I thought what was going to happen in China was a disaster. Well, it was a disaster. Civil war was starting in China, and we knew a civil war would end in Communist victory. It was going to make things a lot worse. We hoped a civil war could be avoided or made a lot shorter."

In connection with his Wheeling West Va, speech of 2/50 Joe McCarthy did attack Service and other China Hands and the Tydings Commission called his bluff. The man had nothing, and for Joe to be used in the article as a reliable source is shoddy in the extreme. Service continued to be attacked when the China Lobby and Hoover came to McCarthy's rescue with more charges against him. Service was cleared six times by six separate loyalty reviews and State Department boards. Finally he was dismissed by the highest board, the Loyalty Review Board, in a one-day hearing, for "reasonable doubt of loyalty," an impossible charge to disprove. He fought his firing for seven years, right up to the Supreme Court. In 1957, the Court ruled 8-0 in his favor.--Griffin FarielloGrifross 23:13, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Grif: Actual source is the National Archives and Records Administration, much of it verbatim. nobs 23:39, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

The Amerasia Papers that the article quotes, as does the NARA link, as summarizing the Amerasia Affair, is a rather bias and skewed presentation of the ordeal. It has even been called propaganda. John Service's rebuttal,The Amerasia Papers: Some Problems in the History of the US-China Relations, provides an excellent deconstruction of its flaws and errors. Grifross did a fair attack on the overall problems, but failed to amend the article, itself. When time allows, I'll attempt to do so. RebelAt 00:13, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Reference

• Ronald Radosh, John Earl Haynes, and Harvey Klehr, Spy stories: The Times vs. history, The New Republic (16 November 1998), 15-16.
• Harvey Klehr, Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1996)
• Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator, (New York: The Free Press, 1999)

UCLA sponsored journal of same name

I am relatively new to wikipedia so I was wondering how we should deal with this: there is an academic journal of Asian-American studies with the same name. I don't think that the journal is notable enough to warrant its own page but perhaps some reference to it should be included in this article to avoid confusion? I will edit to the best of my ability but if someone wants to suggest a better solution it would probably be good. Chris902 (talk) 17:23, 19 October 2009 (UTC)