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

Honorable Survivor weaves John S. Service’s extraordinary story into the fabric of a watershed moment in our history when World War II was ending, the Cold War was dawning, and the McCarthy era witch-hunters were stirring. The book reveals how people, policy, and politics mix to create the circumstances of our lives, and the experiences of one man who came to be at the center of a series of extraordinary events involving the fate of nations. This biography chronicles the experiences of John S. Service. Emmy award-winning journalist Lynne Joiner tells the tale of Service, an idealistic U.S. Foreign Service officer in wartime China who had the misfortune of often being right although U.S. policymakers refused to heed his prescient reporting. He predicted Mao Tse-tung’s successful revolution long before anyone else even knew the Chinese Communists were a potent force, and subsequently became Joseph McCarthy’s first victim.