Loyalty Hearing

Loyalty Hearing

The Amerasia Case cast a web of suspicion over John Service that lasted his entire lifetime.

FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover’s bureau kept a file on John Service for nearly thirty years.
Library of Congress

Sen. Joseph McCarthy found John Service to be a convenient scapegoat at the start of his anti-Communist witch hunt.
Library of Congress

Secretary of State Dean Acheson is surrounded by newsmen at a congressional hearing. A key architect of U.S. foreign policy at the start of the Cold War, Acheson was often a target of McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade against government employees.
Library of Congress

In June 1950, John Service faced simultaneous loyalty investigations by the State Department and the Senate. He was cleared of the charges, but in December 1951 Service was fired on orders of President Truman’s Loyalty Review Board. By unanimous vote in 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered John Service reinstated, but his career as a diplomat never got back on track again.
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

With his lawyer, Ed Rhetts, looking on, John Service testifies before the Senate subcommittee investigating the loyalty of State Department employees in 1950.
Courtesy Service Family