The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

By 1945 White knew that real civil war was inevitable, and when it came, Chiang would collapse and the Communists would win. White realized that this might affect the careers of some of his far-sighted friends in the foreign service when they reported developments as they saw them. He mentioned this to Raymond Ludden, one of the ablest of the young foreign service officers (they were so outstanding that Stilwell had simply taken the best of them from the embassy and attached them to his own staff): “You know something may happen because of this—a lot of people back home aren’t going to like the way it’s going.” And Ludden answered, “The duty of a foreign service officer is to report the truth as he sees it without adjusting it to American domestic considerations.” It was, White thought at the time, a wonderful answer. The sheer honesty and integrity of it moved him, but he was also made uneasy by it; wasn’t there a touch of innocence too? (There was: Ludden spent the rest of his career regarded by his superiors as being contaminated, and was moved around from different non-Asian post to post.) What White had begun to foresee in 1945 very quickly came true. As the China tragedy unfolded, many foreign service officers would have their careers destroyed, but of the group, John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service were the most distinguished, and as such they would suffer the most. Younger men a rank or two below them might quietly leave the Asian bureau and go to another are...

"Theodore H Wright, then a young Time reporter"