John Carter Vincent was born on August 19, 1900, in Seneca, Kansas. He was the son of Francis Vincent, a shopkeeper, and Beulah Carter, a housewife.
His parents were devout Baptists, and he had a strict religious upbringing. The family moved to Macon, Georgia, when John Carter (his familiars addressed him in this southern manner) was six.
After attending local public schools, Vincent enrolled at Clemson University in South Carolina but later transferred to Mercer University in Georgia, from which he graduated in 1923.
Resolving to become a diplomat because Vincent wanted to travel, he applied to the Foreign Service. Despite his lack of a blue-blooded lineage or an Ivy League education one or both of which were usual prerequisites for a diplomatic career and a borderline score on the required exam, Vincent was accepted into the Foreign Service. Vincent was assigned to Changsha, China, where he witnessed military campaigns against the Chinese warlord armies in the chaotic, anarchistic China of that time.
His next assignment was the consulate at Mukden, in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Twice in 1931, he was confronted by Japanese soldiers who threatened him despite his American diplomatic status. Vice-President Wallace had acquired the reputation of being eccentric with an unpredictable personality; moreover, he was on very bad terms with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Moderate and conservative forces in the Democratic party were getting ready for a big push to dump the ultraliberal Wallace from the office of vice president at the party convention. Vincent's mission was a difficult one: to keep Wallace from doing or saying anything that would further erode the credibility of American diplomats in China.
To Vincent's great credit, the Wallace mission was a great success and produced many impartial and informative political reports that analyzed the weaknesses of the Chiang regime while not taking a pro-Communist stance. In personal negotiations with Chiang, Wallace secured approval to send a U. S. observer mission to Communist headquarters in Yenan in return for a recommendation to remove General Joseph Stillwell, the U. S. commander of the Chinese theater of war, from his command.
The Wallace mission reported that America must continue to back Chiang in order to win the war. But it also expressed pessimism about Chiang's ability to remain in power in the long run. But it made no recommendations that would have directly undermined Chiang's rule. Vincent's own position was certainly much more balanced than those of John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service, who were much more outspoken in their pleas for wartime aid to Mao Tse-tung and his Communists.
After the Wallace mission, Vincent found it difficult to work with Ambassador Patrick Hurley and General Albert Wedemeyer, Stillwell's replacement. In addition, from 1945 on, the first charges of subversion and espionage lodged against the China Hands proved distracting to Vincent. His subsequent transfers to Washington, D. C. , Switzerland, and Morocco led to charges by members of the China Lobby that Vincent was being shielded from scrutiny.
Vincent's fate in the years from 1948 to 1953 was similar to that of many high-ranking diplomats who had served in China and who were held responsible by conservatives in the United States for "losing" China to the Communists. He was brought before various loyalty review boards, and he was publicly criticized for misdeeds by conservative anti-Communists. In Vincent's corner, Henry Wallace, Joseph Alsop, and Dean Acheson offered support. But Acheson may have made matters worse for Vincent by his haughty attitude and acerbic statements.
Before his ordeal was over, Vincent endured five loyalty hearings, an unauthorized FBI investigation, and grueling appearances before U. S. Senate and House committees armed with documents leaked by the FBI. He was suspended by Secretary of State Dean Acheson in December 1952, then asked to resign by Acheson's successor, John Foster Dulles, on February 28, 1953. He was not officially charged with disloyalty, but instead with poor judgment. John Carter Vincent retired to Cambridge, Massachusets, and spent the last nineteen years of his life lecturing and writing informally in the Cambridge area.
The viewpoint Vincent brought to his duties in China was that of a passionate supporter of New Deal liberalism. He found both Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Chinese government, and his colleagues authoritarian and corrupt, and called for American pressure to modify Chiang's behavior and nurture liberal factions in Chinese society. Vincent was not pro-Communist in his sympathies before 1941, but he was consistently anti-Chiang and critical of the corrupt Kuomintang party that controlled China. Once the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Vincent's position became easier in some ways, but more difficult in others.
The Japan Hands in the State Department lost influence, and American leaders eagerly sought suggestions from China Hands about how to widen China's contribution to the defeat of Japan. But Vincent and the other China Hands were caught in a political and military crossfire. To Chiang and his supporters, the China Hands seemed reluctant to press for unconditional American aid to China, so the Chinese government turned to conservative American politicians, businessmen, and journalists to plead their case in America; this loosely affiliated group of Chiang Kai-shek supporters became known as "the China Lobby" and grew in influence in the United States as Chiang's fortunes declined in China.
Meanwhile, American military strategists decided to fight Japan outside the Chinese theater of war. President Roosevelt's penchant for sending to China personal envoys who rarely cooperated with the American ambassador to China or career Foreign Service officers contributed to Vincent's (and other China Hands') feelings that they were being ignored.
Vincent's experiences in Mukden made Vincent an early convert to the anti-Japan point of view, an attitude that put him at odds with Japan Hands in the U. S. State Department, including Joseph Grew and Eugene Dooman.
Vincent's top priority was always the defeat of Japan. At first, he advocated strong American pressure to force Chiang to cooperate with and coordinate military campaigns with the Communist forces that controlled much of divided China. By 1944, when this united-front strategy proved unlikely, Vincent joined other Foreign Service colleagues in urging the United States to send an observer mission to Communist headquarters in Yenan and to supply the Communists with arms and ammunition even if Chiang's permission was not forthcoming. This request involved Vincent in the most important chapter of his diplomatic career, his participation in the Henry Wallace mission to Russia and China during 1944. At the start, this last wartime mission by a political celebrity made many American diplomats apprehensive.
Vincent remains a controversial figure. To liberals, he was one of many martyrs to shameless anti-Communist hysteria. To anti-Communists, he was one of the architects of the betrayal of Nationalist China. To his credit, Vincent was a fierce supporter of democratic principles, who believed that World War II gave America a chance to nudge totalitarian China toward democracy.
His chief flaws were his ignorance of the changing America's political climate and the relationship between domestic politics and diplomacy. Like his conservative colleague George Kennan, Vincent believed in the primacy of diplomacy. As a result, both men were dismissed from the Foreign Service and lived to see it filled with mediocrities who avoided risky judgments and allowed the militarization of American foreign policy.
Sent to Peking for language training, Vincent met Elizabeth Spencer, a writer traveling in China, courted her, and married her in 1931. They had two children.
