Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1956-06-15
An Ordeal Ends

1t has been 10 years, more or less,
since the case of John Stewart Service
first popped into the news. Now this
ordeal-and it must have been all of that
for this former State Department career
nan-apparently has come to an end.
A unanimous panel of the United
States Court of Appeals has upheld the
1851 dismissal of Mr.. Service by Dean
Acheson, then Secretary of State. At the
same time, the appellate court has
sustained District Judge Curran in his
ruling that the adverse references to Mr..
Services loyalty should be stricken from
the record. All in all, this is about as
satisfactory an ending as one could expect
to strange and puzzling case.
Mr.. Service had been career man
in China. When he returned to this coun-
try he met Philip Jaffe, left-wing editor
of the magazine AmeraSia, and turned
over some "Secret" State Department
documents to him. Mr.. Service said he
thought he was dealing with reputable
editor, and that the documents, although
stamped Secret" were matters of
common knowledge.
The State Department loyalty board,
concluding that Mr.. Service, at most, was
guilty of a single serious indiscretion,"
cleared him on loyalty grounds and
ordered that he be reinstated.
Despite this clearance, the Loyalty
Review Board reopened the case. This
higher boards report said that MIR.
Service, after giving the documents to
Mr.. Jaffe, checked up on him. He was
warned, said the report, that Mr.. Jaffe
was bad medicine" left-winger very
sympathetic to communism, and that he
might actually be Communist. Never
theleSS, said the board, it learned from
the FBI apparently from recordings)
that Mr.. Service had held conversations
with Mr.. Jaffe in the latter's hotel room,
the last of these being on May 90, 1916
after he had reason to be suspicious of
Mr.. Jaffe. These conversations, the report
said, indicate that there was some con-
VITALITY, and that Service talked very
freely, discussing, among other things,
troop dispositions and military plans
which he said he had seen and which he
said were very secret" On this basis, the
Review Board concluded that there was
AOdoOAldDAC AOuOb do W N1I. OGIVlCGS
loyalty.
Mr.. Acheson said he considered this
finding by the Review Board to be
advisory only, and that he was not legally
bound by it. He discharged Mr.. Service
by exercising his "own judgment" under
an act of Congress, then in effect, giving
him absolute discretion to get rid of any
employe if he felt such action advisable
in the interests of the United States.
That was the status of the case
in 1851. Subsequently, however, the
Supreme Court, in the Peters case, ruled
that the Review Board could not reopen
loyalty proceeding once an employee had
been cleared by departmental board.
So, in the Service case, the courts have
wiped out the Review Boards findings on
the loyalty question, while upholding the
discharge of Mr.. Service by the Secretary,
acting under his discretionary authority.
This, to repeat, is about as happy an
ending as could be expected in a case
which is surrounded with doubt, and
which has worked a great hardship ON
Mr.. Service if, in fact, he was merely
lndiscreet and not diSloyal