Honorable Survivor: Mao’s China, McCarthy’s America, and the Persecution of John S. Service

UC Berkeley presents a talk by Lynne Joiner on John Service's experience in revolutionary China.

Lynne Joiner, Broadcast journalist, news anchor, and documentary filmmaker

John S. Service, before he was associated with UC Berkeley in later life, lived through extraordinary times between the worlds of wartime and revolutionary China and a post-war America gripped by anti-Communist hysteria.  Lynne Joiner discusses her biography of Jack Service, the story of an idealistic U.S. Foreign Service officer in wartime China who early on predicted Mao Zedong’s successful revolution. His prescient reports went unheeded by U.S. policy makers, and later he became Senator Joseph McCarthy’s first victim. The author describes Service’s long fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered him reinstated, and reveals how his renewed career was derailed by anti-communist crusaders, the China lobby, the FBI, and Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police. Honorable Survivor weaves John S. Service’s life story into the fabric of watershed moments in history.

Introduced by Tom Gold, Sociology, UC Berkeley.