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Up for sale a VERY RARE! "Diplomat Accused of Being A Comunist" John Carter Vincent Signed TLS Dated 1952. This lot includes a rare copy of his speech of February 20th, 1952 in Tangiers.
ES-4206E
John
Carter Vincent (August
19, 1900 – December 3, 1972) was an American diplomat, Foreign Service Officer,
and China Hand. He was forced to resign after accusations that he
was a communist. Born in Seneca, Kansas, Vincent graduated from Mercer University in 1923 and was appointed a Foreign Service Officer the same year. He then and Dalian before he became Counsellor to the US Embassy
in Chongqing in 1942. Vincent was among the China Hands who wanted to gather intelligence from and
provide material to the Communist armies, then part of the Allied coalition in
the war against Japan and ostensibly under Chiang Kai-shek's command. When Vincent and other China Hands
including John A. Wallace on a
state visit to the Soviet Union and Chongqing in June 1944, he helped to persuade Chiang to
finally grant permission for the Dixie Mission, which opened contact with the Communist base
areas. According to the New York Times, The China experts, traveling through
the areas controlled by various warlords, reported that Chiang's Nationalist
Party, the Kuomintang, was dragging its feet,
reserving its American-supplied arms for an eventual showdown with the
Communists. The old China hands predicted that in such a fight, the Communists
would win. They called instead for American pressure on Chiang to reform his
Government and direct his forces against the Japanese, in cooperation with the
Communists. "Selfish and corrupt, incapable and obstructive," were a
few of the words Mr. Service used to describe the Chiang Government in a 1944
memo to General Stilwell. Vincent and the China Hands also argued that the
Chinese Communists had their own genuine domestic roots that might trump any
ideological loyalty to the USSR, as was occurring at the time with Tito's
Yugoslavia. The defenders of the China Hands argued that it was exactly this
perspective in China policy that Nixon and Kissinger began to implement in
1972. He became Director of the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs in 1945 and
then envoy to Switzerland
in 1947 to 1951. He was diplomatic agent in Tangier 1951 to 1952. In 1951,
Vincent was attacked by US Senator Joseph McCarthy and accused of having been a member of
the Communist Party by former party activist Louis F. Budenz. Budenz believed in summer 1951 that Vincent
had been a member of the party. Bundez admitted that he had no proof but
claimed to have learned that from having overheard other party leaders, who
were discussing Hurley. They
disliked Hurley and hoped that Vincent would be his replacement. Similar
accusations were made against all the China Hands because of their allegations
of ineptitude and corruption of Chiang's regime. After having been cleared by
numerous administrative security panels of any disloyalty, in December 1952,
the Civil Service Loyalty
Review Board found reasonable doubt on Vincent's loyalty by a
margin of one vote. In 1953, Secretary John Foster Dulles requested
Vincent's resignation.[3] Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State, steadfastly
defended Vincent, just as he had done for Alger Hiss, and thought that the China Hands generally were
being unfairly and demagogically maligned for honestly conveying inconvenient
facts. Acheson tried to intervene with Dulles to save Vincent's career.