The Mantle of Charity

In the spring of 1945, the FBI had its lines all set for Philip Jaffe, the editor of the pro-Communist magazine Amerasia, and was about to arrest him. Then one day, John Stewart Service, a lean-jawed, young State Department foreign service officer just back from China, walked into Jaffe's hotel room in Washington and into the range of FBI microphones. Service lent Jaffe a sheaf of State Department reports on China, some stamped "secret" and "confidential." In four separate hotel-room sessions, he talked to Jaffe at great length about U.S. policy in China, twice cautioning Jaffe that the information he gave him was "very secret" or "confidential."

Double Indictment. Six times in the ensuing six years, the State Department's own Loyalty Security Board debated whether these meetings made Service guilty of disloyalty to the U.S. Six times Service was cleared. (For the sixth hearing, he was recalled while en route to be U.S. consul general in Calcutta.) Last week the Civil Service Commission's Loyalty Review Board, the capital's top loyalty panel, reversed the finding, decided there was a "reasonable doubt" of Service's loyalty, and recommended that he be fired.

The evidence before both boards was virtually the same, and the reversal was as much an indictment of State's loyalty judgments as it was of Service. The State Department board accepted Service's defense that he had been giving Jaffe the same kind of "background" briefing he would give any reporter, let him off with a wrist tap for "indiscretion." Said the top board in its reversal: "[Service] knew very early in his association with Jaffe that Jaffe was a very doubtful character, extremely left-wing [and Service] had a continuing line of warnings as to Jaffe's character . . . Yet, notwithstanding, we find in the [hotel] conversations no indication of any caution by Service . . . Jaffe . .. rarely failed to get from Service what he asked for."

The top loyalty board pointed to a letter in the evidence from the New York Times's then-China Correspondent Brooks Atkinson (which had, ironically, been written in Service's defense), stating that Service "never permitted me to see classified material and was cautious and guarded about matters he considered confidential." Said the board: "The contrast between his treatment of Jaffe and his treatment of Brooks Atkinson ... requires no comment. To say that [Service's] course of conduct does not raise a reasonable doubt as to Service's own loyalty would, we are forced to think, stretch the mantle of charity much too far."

"Good, Good, Good!" As soon as the reversal arrived at the State Department, Deputy Under Secretary for Administration Carl Humelsine called Service to his office, and fired him. Service, now 42, called the decision a "surprise, a shock and an injustice--I am not now and never have been disloyal to the United States." Joe McCarthy, who called Service "proSoviet" nearly two years ago, and who kept the case alive, heard the news in Los Angeles, and exclaimed: "Good, good, good!"

. . .

Four days after its finding on Service, the top loyalty-review board this week ordered federal agencies to recheck 565 U.S. employees previously cleared of disloyalty charges. The board's reason: some of the old clearances might be judged differently under the presidential order of last April which makes "reasonable doubt" (instead of "reasonable grounds") sufficient cause for a thumbs-down verdict.

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