ABSTRACT
Most American intellectuals probably agree with White that the firing of the China Hands was unconscionable and that a lack of the China Hands' feel for Asia helped lead to Vietnam. The Amerasia case, breaking in the spring of 1945. The premises of that small-circulation, left-wing monthly, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents seized a number of security-classified government documents. The policies they favored might well have been wiser policies. But elected representatives of the American people felt differently, and the China Hands became targets of attack because of the policies their reportage encouraged, not because their reportage was inaccurate. The wrong done by the Joseph McCarthy lancers, under McCarthy leadership, was to poke out the eyes and ears of the State Department on Asian affairs, to blind American foreign policy. And flying blind into the murk of Asian politics, American diplomacy carried American honor, resources, and lives into the triple canopied jungles and green-carpeted hills of Vietnam where all crashed.
