The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

by David Talbot

Most of its victims were highly competent, experienced members of the foreign service whose policy differences with the new Dulles regime simply rendered them “incompatibles,” in McLeod’s Orwellian term. A number of these purge victims, such as John Carter Vincent and John Paton Davies Jr., were veterans of the China desk, where their only crime was infuriating the right-wing Taiwan lobby by honestly evaluating why Communist revolutionary Mao Tse-tung had been able to defeat corrupt warlord Chiang Kai-shek. The civil service apparatus was supposed to protect respected officials like this, many of whom had made valuable contributions to the U.S. government’s understanding of the world. But ideology trumped ability in Foster’s intensely politicized State Department.