The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Under normal conditions it might have been John Paton Davies, Jr.; he and John Stewart Service had seemed equal in overall ability, but those who knew them both well thought Davies was more likely to succeed in the operational aspect of government, to move up into the part of the Department where an expert begins to exercise power, while Jack Service was more cerebral, ticketed perhaps for a post as an ambassador, or for a major role at the Policy Planning Council. Had it worked out that way, with John Davies as Assistant Secretary, it might all have been different, because this would have meant that one of the principals was a genuine area expert. He would have been able to explain to his peers and his superiors the danger signals, the toughness of the fabric of the enemy, and the weakness of the friendly society. He would have been able to fight for the views of the intelligence people, in large part because those would have been his own views. But John Paton Davies was not in the State Department at the time, he was not in Washington at the time, he was, in fact, not in the country at the time. He was sitting in Peru manufacturing furniture, calling himself “an unfrocked diplomat.” He was watching American policy in Asia, and he was appalled by it.

  He was not an optimist about the incumbent Administration; he regarded the excitement and the promises of the New Frontier with a considerable amount of skepticism. He had become, involuntarily, a good deal more of an expert on political and bureaucratic timidity than he had ever intended. He watched from his distant vantage point as Kennedy and Nixon ran against each other, and their banalities on Quemoy and Matsu did not bring him any great confidence that they were ready to come to terms with the irrationality of America’s China policy; the Democratic party, if anything, still seemed to be very much on the defensive, and this did not bode well either for the China policy or for John Davies. His wife had listened to shortwave accounts of the Kennedy election victory and was genuinely excited. Nixon was a reincarnation of Dulles, but these were their people, their friends coming back into office. Rose Kennedy herself was a good friend of Lucretia Grady, the mother of Patricia Grady Davies; they were both of the same generation, both of that special Catholic aristocracy in America. Lucretia Grady was a real political trooper who had worked hard for the Kennedys in the campaign, giving parties and raising money. There would be some influence there, and there was talk between the women that something would be done for John Davies, his name cleared, his security clearance reinstated, his ability to make a living restored.

  A few weeks after the election Patricia Davies felt even better when she learned that the new Secretary of State would be Dean Rusk. Dean was a friend, a good friend of John’s; they had served together in the CBI theater, and what could be better than have an old friend heading the very institution that had wronged her husband? Then day by day as the other names of the Administration were announced she was even more enthusiastic: Kennan and Harriman, two old friends who knew John Davies’ real worth and had stood by him during his long and terrible ordeal. This was going to be so much better than the atmosphere of the old administration of John Foster Dulles, who had fired her husband. John Davies, however, was more cautious; he did not think the new Administration was in any great hurry to change past policies, and if they were not willing to take any political heat to change a policy of irrationality toward 700,000,000 Chinese, then it might be too much to expect them to take a great deal of heat, or even a little heat, for one fallen and easily forgotten comrade. John Davies had always viewed human nature with an abiding skepticism, and he had rarely been wrong.

  They were living in their own self-imposed exile in Peru, and while he ran the furniture factory, she helped him and did some interior decorating on the side. They had recast their lives after he was fired in 1954; at that point, when McCarthy’s charges finally caught up with him, he was serving in Peru (he had been transferred from a more important job in Berlin because he was under investigation); they had remained in Peru, starting their own factory. They were not particularly good at the furniture business, at least in the financial sense (some of his designs, however, won international prizes), and they had made as many mistakes as one could possibly make, they had union problems in their tiny shop; nothing had gone easily. But they had managed to make a living since that date in 1954 when John Davies was forced out of government, and from that date on he never looked back. His past had died, the career as a foreign service officer had died, and the China he knew had died. He would not look back nor mourn the past. He spent the day after he was fired from his profession with Theodore White, but though they were old friends from China, they did not discuss the past. John Davies had walked in, carefully checked White’s apartment for microphones—he was already showing that much effect from his persecution—and then he had talked of the future. Only the future. He had unfurled a map of Peru. He was going to go to the inner slope of the Andes and carve out a new living. He would not let his life dwindle into a special kind of idleness and frustration, sitting by a phone hoping for someone else to determine his fate and his future. John Davies would not pass on his failed hopes to his children. He would instead determine his life himself. He was a man of ferocious pride; though he was practically without means, he would not, even when separated from the Department, sign a release which would have brought him several thousand badly needed dollars, because resigning would deprive him of his own professional papers and perhaps a future chance to challenge what had happened to him and to write honestly of it. He was not anxious to remain in America, it was his country and he would not criticize it, but again, he did not want his children to grow up in an atmosphere of condescension, political insecurity or fake sympathy. So Peru it would be.

  There he created his new life. He moved his family away from the luxurious American ghetto of Lima into a native quarter, partly because the American section was a good deal more expensive and also because he wanted to be out of that particular all-American atmosphere, more suburban than the most antiseptic of suburbs at home. If he was going to live overseas he wanted his children to grow up in a truly cosmopolitan climate. After all, he had grown up in that kind of special atmosphere of being a poor expatriate forced to live both in and off a foreign culture, and he did not think it had hurt his childhood at all. In Peru his family became exclusively his world. He was the patriarch of a large family growing larger; though he and his wife were not young, they started a second tier of their family, three more children were born, making a total of seven. It was, thought friends of theirs, done as an act of the human spirit as much as anything else. Life centered, not as it might have under normal conditions for most successful Americans in the achieving society, on job and career, but rather on home and family. It was a special kind of childhood for the young Davieses: with a father who was very demanding of them, setting high moral, intellectual and human standards, and yet who was always there and always, for all his sternness, very gentle with them.

  By contemporary American upper-middle-class standards they were reasonably poor. They wore hand-me-down clothes, yet they made the most of what was around them. They went exploring, setting off every weekend and every vacation for trips into the interior, always in the same tired old 1953 station wagon, which the children were somewhat ashamed of, always hoping that it would not break down. Slowly the children of John Davies came to realize that of them, their father was the greatest adventurer; he always wanted to try something and learn something new. By 1961 there was a touch of irony to this: John Davies living outside the fancy swish of the New Frontier, which by ability, style, charm, connections and professionalism he seemed to be bred to, but instilling in his children some of the stoicism which was part of the frontier values and virtues he had learned on another frontier as a missionary’s child in China. His children grew up uncorrupted by the plush, air-conditioned alienation of American middle-class life (when the family returned to America in 1964 Mrs. Davies believed her children were better for the hardness of their life. The family seemed to have traditional values and a strong se
nse of loyalty at a time when the children of most of their friends were on some kind of drugs).

  While John Davies sent his children to Peruvian schools, he made sure that their education was complete. He was their unofficial tutor in the classics and in contemporary events; he made them read the New York Times and asked them questions about it, seeking not just the right answers, but answers which showed that they could think. He made them listen to classical music and quizzed them. They talked of many things, but one thing they did not discuss was his past and specifically the McCarthy investigations; there seemed to be a tacit agreement that it was not to be discussed. He did not want anybody’s sympathy, and he particularly did not want his children to feel sorry either for him or for themselves. Later, as they grew older and went off to college, they became more aware of his past and began to ask questions. They did not feel sorry for him, but became quite proud of him, particularly of the fact that he was so steadfast, that he had made the State Department people fire him rather than docilely resign and take their money and save them from embarrassment. A resignation would of course have been beneficial to him as well, giving him a decent and desperately needed pension, but he turned them down. He had done nothing wrong, and that ferocious and stern pride, product of that missionary background, did not let him compromise with his honor. He was, they thought, a linear and secular descendant of the Christian martyrs.

  They became aware of the strain on him, the sacrifice, the lack of money, the loss of his beloved profession, and sometimes they wondered if he would ever show the strain. But he always seemed so gentle and so comforting, and the flashes of emotion and tensions, the break in the control, were so rare that they would stand out. When Sacha Davies was fifteen, she wanted to be a singer, and she remembers waltzing in one evening and saying that when she grew up she would be a famous singer and make a million dollars and give it all to her father, and John Davies, suddenly raging, anger flashing through him, his voice very tense and harsh: “I don’t need your money! Don’t ever mention that to me again! I don’t want anyone’s money!” And then the storm passed.

  There were few reminders of China, because China, too, was part of the past. Occasionally when an old friend from those days, like Eric Sevareid, showed up, they would reminisce. Once Jack Service came down and stayed with them for a week and they were joined by C. J. Pao, the Chinese ambassador to Peru, a boyhood friend, and there were barbecues, with the three of them going off into the night singing old Chinese songs, a touch of sadness in the air, China, the real China, in the past for all of them.

  He was not, of course, very wrong about the Kennedy Administration. Having a good many friends there meant little. He knew that Harriman and Kennan had pressed his case, and Arthur Schlesinger was working on his behalf, as was McGeorge Bundy. But his old friend Rusk seemed preoccupied; there was little word from him. Soon after Kennedy took office Harriman let his old friend know that nothing could be done in the first term; his clearance was one of the wondrous things which would take place in the second term. Davies was not surprised, but he remained even more dubious and suspicious about the integrity and brilliance of the Administration. In 1962, hearing that Sargent Shriver of the Peace Corps and the Kennedy family was in Peru, Davies looked up from his desk to see Shriver, surrounded by a phalanx of young Peace Corpsmen heading for his office. Davies simply fled out the back door, thinking it was some cheap political trick (which perhaps it was, though during the fifties Shriver, who was quite good on civil liberties, had been regarded as something of the family Communist by a more conservative Joe Kennedy and his son Robert). Shriver came and left without seeing Davies, and when his wife, Patricia, heard about it, it was one of the few times that she was genuinely angry with him.

  Thus their life in exile. The rest of the nation was caught up in a mood of high style and excitement about its power and its role in the world, yet those who knew most about the price the country had paid—or had not paid—were far from the centers of power, far from the hubris of the American age. After they finally returned to America in 1964, they ran into an old friend. He asked Patricia Davies how it had been, and he would remember both the answer and the way she said it—“We’ve had a terrible time”—but she said it gaily.

  Davies was the secular puritan. That Spartan, uncomplaining quality had its roots in his childhood, and in later years as his children grew up and learned with fascination of their father, they believed that the missionary background was more a part of him than he knew; that if he had rejected the overt Christianity for atheism he nonetheless retained the values and outlook of his boyhood, the stoic sense of accepting what life gave you.

  John Paton Davies senior, who was one of nine children of a Welsh immigrant, went as a Baptist missionary to China, the most exotic and marvelous place to do God’s work (indeed his son would write of it some sixty years later: “Churchgoing Americans—and that was most Americans—had grown up believing that of all the Lord’s vineyards, China was perhaps the most beloved”). The boyhood in China during the time of World War I was a true frontier experience, hard and unsparing, oil lamps, milking cows to get your own milk, growing up with Chinese kids. “It puts iron in your blood,” his ninety-one-year-old father remarked in 1969. John Davies could recall living in the village of Chen Tu as a boy when two opposing war lords put it under siege. His mother wrote letters to both sides demanding a cease-fire, which was finally granted. Then Mrs. Davies marched out with her two sons, protected by the soldiers of one war lord, finally tipping the soldiers with what was known in China as rice-wine money, but in the families of missionaries as tea money.

  In the twenties China was alive with great forces coming into conflict, one order was collapsing, a new one was rising, it was really a China afire. Death and suffering were all around him; he became inured to them. As a boy and as a young man, Davies was a knowledgeable witness to revolution; the son of Michael Borodin, there to organize China for the Comintern, was a classmate at school, as were many of the boys who would become leaders in the divided China of the thirties and forties. He grew up with China in his blood, with a kind of skeptical love for it, not a naÏve love for it. He learned to love China the hard way, for like Service and other sons of missionaries, there was a certain disillusion in realizing the futility of their parents’ work. They knew that whatever else happened, China was not going to be saved and modernized by coming to Jesus Christ; China was China, and Christ was alien, Western, white. But if this was true, then their parents, selfless, decent people, were wasting their lives in at least one sense, and friends thought this accounted for much of the skepticism and irony which marked John Davies’ outlook for the rest of his life. Growing up as a young American in China had already made him something of an outsider; now as a young man, jarred loose from the perceptions of his parents, he was even more intellectually and culturally independent at a surprisingly young age. From this would come John Davies the outsider, cool, involved intellectually but uninvolved emotionally, the perfect reporter. If anything, he was brought up with a sense of the vastness of China, resistant to outside influence, be it Western Christian or Western capitalist or Western Communist, China determined somehow to come up with its own definition of itself formed on its own terms. It was a brilliant and far-reaching vision, but it did not necessarily serve him well.

  His unique intellect was honed even more by a college education which was part American, part Chinese; even the American years were unique. In the late twenties he was one of eighty students admitted to the experimental college started at the University of Wisconsin by Alexander Meiklejohn, an innovative educator who had just been fired from Amherst. Protected by the liberalism of the La Follettes, this was to be the special college, the attempt to mold the classical mind with the classical education. There were no classes as such, the emphasis was to be on education, on opening the mind. The first year was spent studying nothing but Greek civilization, the second nothing but nineteenth-century American civilization
and comparing the values of the two civilizations. In a way it was a spawning ground for revolutionaries, young men who went back to their hometowns, making too many ripples; after only four years the school was closed, largely upon the protests of parents who objected to their children coming back and asking too many disturbing questions. For Davies it was a marvelous time, the best of a university flashed before him. He was a good student, intelligent, a little reserved, as though somewhat bemused by all those college hijinks around him. But the education further developed an already identifiable quality in him; it taught the students to think in terms of civilizations, not just in terms of governments. After all, governments come and go, but civilizations linger on. There were certain values, beliefs, qualities which would prevail, no matter what the outward form of the government. These were lessons which Davies later applied to the contemporary world, and it would explain why his reporting was so profound; it was always touched with a sense of history. He saw something in a country and the society far deeper than the events of the moment. His reporting intuitively reflected the past as well as the present, and it marked him as no ordinary reporter or observer.